eJournals

Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 40 Nonhuman Perspectives Edited by Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 40 Editors Tobias Döring , LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, D-80799 München, Germany Jennifer Fleissner , University of Chicago, Department of English, Walker Hall, 4th Floor, 1115 E. 58th St., Chicago, IL 60637, USA Ansgar Nünning, Universität Gießen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10, 35394 Gießen, Germany Donald E. Pease, English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Johannes Voelz, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Institut für England- & Amerikastudien, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60629 Frankfurt am Main, Germany Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), Catherine Belsey † (University of Wales), Marshall Brown (University of Washington), Ronald Shusterman (Université Jean Monnet), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen) Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Jennifer Fleissner · Ansgar Nünning Donald E. Pease · Johannes Voelz 40 Nonhuman Perspectives Edited by Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber © 2026 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. 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Internet: www.narr.de eMail: info@narr.de Druck: Elanders Waiblingen GmbH ISSN 0723-0338 ISBN 978-3-381-14981-0 (Print) ISBN 978-3-381-14982-7 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-381-14983-4 (ePub) Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. 7 25 49 67 89 111 135 155 Contents Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber In Search of the Nonhuman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nonhuman Worldmaking Jochen Achilles Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities: Theoretical Conceptions and Literary Anticipations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . James Dowthwaite The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited . . . Julia Boll Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Xaver Boxhammer Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse Gender and the Nonhuman Paul Fagan Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Laura Handl “I feel like becoming the monster he made”: Politics of Anger in Narratives of Nonhuman Femme Monsters in Stone Blind (2022) and The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home (2020) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Emily Anderson Challenging Anthropocentric Attitudes through More-Than-Human Narration in Monique Roffey’s Magical Realist Novel The Mermaid of Black Conch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 195 217 239 257 277 295 298 Animal Perspectives Wolfgang Funk Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irmtraud Huber Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Raphael Zähringer From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Material Perspectives Sina Schuhmaier Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) . Alexander Scherr The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography: Lines of Air in Smith, Wordsworth, and Coleridge . . . . . . Sarah Wegener Rhizomic Minds: Transversal Perspective in Lauren James’s Green Rising . Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents In Search of the Nonhuman Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber The Dolphin’s Song Man is a fool as a rule but we must humour him in school. So far he only plays with hoops but we suspect he talks and every time he looks at us we blow our tops and surface laughing ‒ really we must try to communicate before it is too late with the silly suicidal but engaging skate. (Edwin Morgan) ‘Sometimes it takes a non-human to say what it is to be a good human’. ( Jasper Fforde, The Constant Rabbit) Introduction: Can the nonhuman speak? Perhaps one should think about this collection as what in Germany we would call a Schildbürgerstreich, an absurd undertaking, riddled with self-contradiction from the start and doomed to failure. By what logic could one even begin to look for nonhuman perspectives in any production of human culture? Is the nonhuman not by definition assigned to the referential position of object of representation, never the representing subject? Are not all attempts to imagina‐ tively reach out beyond human perspectives projections of an impossible desire? If we presume to ‘give a voice’ to the nonhuman, are we irredeemably anthro‐ pomorphising and appropriating its alterity? After all, as Karla Armbruster DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 1 Without mentioning the term ‘performativity’ explicitly, Armbruster emphasises the contingency of any such ascription: “what we think of as discrete entities”, she claims, “do not enter into relationships with each other but are produced by relations” (2012: 12; original emphases). reminds us, the “practice of speaking for others, even when undertaken with the best of intentions, carries a real danger of misrepresentation and, in particular, of erasing difference, of turning the other into the same” (2012: 6). If it is a commonplace to stress even the difficulty of communicating phenomenological experiences of reality between individual humans (do I see the same shade of red as you do? ), surely to enter into the different perceptual experience of another species or entity is an utter impossibility. Any attempt to do so in human forms of cultural representation, based as they inevitably are on human language or human visual perception, must be doubly doomed. Human cultural endeavour necessarily implies an anthropocentric position and, in view of such inevitability, to represent and do justice to nonhuman perspectives can only be a vain endeavour. They are nowhere to be found. This, however, is only one way of approaching the subject. From another point of view, instead of being absent, nonhuman perspectives are in fact overwhelmingly ubiquitous; we are constantly surrounded and enveloped by them and still they remain problematically undifferentiated. On the one hand, ‘nonhuman’ here functions as an unmanageably amorphous signifier, dizzyingly broad in its negativity. It encompasses and assimilates the bulk of the known universe only to forestall any particular perspectivity within it. In face of the vast multiplicity of what could possibly be meant by ‘nonhuman’, the human itself threatens to dwindle into insignificance. On the other hand, since as Erica Fudge puts it “‘human’ is a category only meaningful in difference” (2002: 10), it is impossible to talk about the human without implying the nonhuman. Instead of constituting an ontological category, ‘human’ is, from this perspective, a per‐ formative term, in that it sets up its fundamental conviction (anthropocentrism) as the theoretical ground zero of its analysis (human-nonhuman relationality). 1 After all, what is human is always, necessarily, defined and constituted by that which it excludes. This, however, could also imply that our human perception, and ordering, of the world is not quite as unassailable as conventional wisdom might make it out to be. Already Francis Bacon, back in the early seventeenth century, suspected that “the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 8 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber 2 In The Open: Man and Animal (2004), Giorgio Agamben has described this nexus of epistemological and ontological distinction as the workings of the ‘anthropological machine’, a system which designates, in Mario Ortiz Robles’ words, “the discursive apparatus that both installs and polices the ontological difference Western thought posits between human and non-human” and “whose function is not the blurring of categorical difference but its affirmation” (2016: 14, 146). receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it” (qt. in Fudge 2000: 5). 2 This is most obviously the case in the fraught and shifting distinction between human and animal, which has been so extensively discussed and critiqued in the context of animal studies. To speak about the human is necessarily to discursively construct a generalised animal other whose alterity continuously encroaches on the boundaries of the signifier. But even beyond the human-animal relation, what is human is inevitably circumscribed by the nonhuman. Human existence cannot be extricated from the entanglement of material and organic ecologies which both sustain and threaten (human) life and culture. This speaks to one central paradox of this our Anthropocene: the very moment at which humankind is undoubtedly the dominant force in terms of impacting on the earth’s biological, climatological and geological development is accompanied by a growing awareness that there is no human perspective which would not be circumscribed and conditioned by nonhuman factors. Finally, the distinction between human and nonhuman threatens to utterly collapse when we let Donna Haraway remind us that “human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body” (2008: 3). Even the human is, to all intents and purposes, nonhuman. Cary Wolfe makes a similar point from a less clearly scientific position when he claims that “there is no longer any good reason to take it for granted that the theoretical, ethical, and political question of the subject is automatically coterminous with the species distinction between Homo sapiens and everything else”, meaning ultimately that “the ‘human’, we now know, is not now, and never was, itself ” (2003: 1, 9). From both positions, that of anthropocentric essentialism or posthuman deconstruction, the central concern of this collection must appear doomed from the start, as either the nonhuman or the human (or both) prove utterly elusive. And yet. Cultural productions constantly imaginatively engage with nonhuman perspectives by explicitly negotiating their alterity and relation to human perspectives, and they have done so for as long as we have any cultural record. In literature in particular, nonhuman speakers and focalisers are far from uncommon. Though narratology has sometimes labelled them as DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 9 “unnatural” (Alber 2016) or “strange” (Zunshine 2008), literary history teems with things, animals, plants, super-, subor posthuman entities which have the ability and power to speak, act and think on their own. Indeed, they even dominate certain genres (most obviously, fables and children’s literature). Such nonhuman perspectives can take many forms and pursue various aims. As allegories or fables they may satirise and criticise human society, in children’s literature they may serve to entertain or simplify plots, add an element of adventure, or provide a sense of safety by creating emotional distance between the story and the child’s reality. There is also a long tradition, reaching back to medieval literature and beyond, of animal and object speakers in riddles, typically using a first-person voice asking “what am I”? In such a context, nonhuman voices challenge and amuse, but may also be seen to “alienate the audience from the familiar human perspectives and align us instead with the animal, vegetable, mineral, meteorological (and sometimes even the man-made) Other”, as Erin Sebo has argued (2018: 50). In another genre distinctly devoted to nonhuman perspectives, the novel of circulation, which came to popularity in the eighteenth century, speaking objects helped to make sense of the commodity logic of rising capitalism and served as picaresque narrators whose nonhuman nature allowed them to easily transgress rigid human class boundaries, but also to pass moral judgement on human folly (Bellamy 1998: 119-128). Didactic literature employs animal and object speakers to make their objects vivid, simple and appealing. More recently, nonhuman perspectives proliferate in fantasy and science fiction, often adding to the thrill of the unfamiliar and mysterious, and they can be found increasingly beyond literature in film and in video games. Rather than being surprising, or strange, in some genres nonhuman speakers are what we may reasonably expect. As has often been noted, such ostensibly nonhuman perspectives are, more often than not, anthropomorphic to the point of entirely erasing any specifically nonhuman characteristics of behaviour and commonly invite a reading as allegory, metaphor or satire, a thin veil for decidedly anthropocentric concerns (Norris 1985: 17; Ortiz Robles 2016: 147; Baker 2019: 5). Thus the effect of nonhuman perspectives, it would seem, by and large depends on the degree in which they are anthropomorphic and familiar, or set out to be strange, uncanny or surprising. In view of such at times contradictory affordances, Lars Bernaerts et al. have called nonhuman narration “protean” and argue that its versatility is a result of what they call a “double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization (on the one hand), human and non-human experientiality (on the other)” (2014: 89; original emphasis). Nonhuman perspectives may in one instance feature as the epitome of coziness and in the next be utterly disturbing. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 10 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber And yet even in their most anthropomorphic form, nonhuman perspectives always carry with them at least the possibility to decentre a human point of view. While the strong appeal of nonhuman perspectives long predates more current concerns with rethinking human-nonhuman relationships in the Anthropocene, these latter have come to dominate the critical debate, as recent years have seen increasing interest in imagining the nonhuman as nonhuman. At the same time, the growing ecological awareness and the broader challenges of Anthropocene thinking change current perspectives on earlier texts. Thus the just-mentioned double dialectic comes into play, in part, through the perspective of the reader. Take, for instance, Edwin Morgan’s dolphin in the poem which serves as an epigraph to this introduction. Of course, the poem’s humour works by flipping the positions of human and animal, thus deliberately anthropomorphising the dolphin and animalising the man. The poem presents a paradox by establishing the verbal communication between dolphin and man whose possibility it explicitly denies, or rather acknowledges only as a future project. This project, however, is assigned an urgency derived very much from a decidedly present perspective: “we must try to communicate / before it is too late” (ll. 9-10), the dolphin asserts, because man is “suicidal” (l. 12), and potentially dangerous for the environment they share. Clearly the object of this poem is not an earnest attempt to enter into the thought processes and perceptions of an actual dolphin, and one might argue that it trivialises the animal suffering involved specifically in dolphin shows as well as humankind’s imminent threat to their common lived-in environment in more general terms. It is firmly anthropocentric in the way its self-deprecating humour is necessarily directed at the human. Nonetheless, the defamiliarisation and reversal of the dolphin’s perspective - how it ‘mistakes’ its human ‘keepers’ as merely “play[ing] with hoops” (l. 4) - serves to question the conventional understanding of the relation and power dynamic between dolphin and human and to highlight the incongruity of human treatment of dolphins (and other animals). Yet surely, Morgan’s poem is likely to speak more readily and more urgently to readers today than when it was first published in 1970, before even the publication of the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth. Surely, the dolphin’s characterisation of man as “suicidal” resonates differently with an audience more mindful of the anthropogenic destruction of the environment, and its admonition that it might soon be too late rings more ominously in our later ears. While it is still funny, the laughter the poem provokes is perhaps more likely to stick in our throats. If anthropocentrism is indeed performative to a degree, then it can also be subverted and purposefully misread. Such (mis)readings in turn might help to overcome, or at least contest the “conceptual or rhetorical dualisms that DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 11 separate the human from the nonhuman—variously conceived as animals, plants, organisms, climatic systems, technologies, or ecosystems” (Grusin 2015: x). It is the critics, as much as the texts, who need to make the imaginative leap into a broad variety of nonhuman perspectives and, by doing so, seek “to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which, you, too, participate” (Bennett 2010: 116). In that sense, too, Wolfe is right to insist that “the place of literature is radically reframed in a larger universe of communication, response, and exchange, which now includes manifold other species” (2009: 571). As emerges from the contributions collected in this volume, whether nonhuman perspectives have the capacity to challenge us depends not least on our own willingness, as readers and critics, to admit their alterity. Of posthuman and nonhuman perspectives The various approaches to nonhuman perspectives this volume brings together converge in such a willingness to admit and recover alterity. Not all of them are concerned with nonhuman speakers, though. The nonhuman perspective the contributions assume, perhaps paradoxically, is first and foremost the perspective of the human critic, prepared to centre nonhuman elements in their objects of study, be it in the form of the agency of microbes, the design of a gameworld or the wind that blows through lines of Romantic poetry. While, in most cases, such readings are placed within a distinctly posthuman framework, this volume can also be seen to partake of what Richard Grusin has termed “the nonhuman turn”, a tendency that is “engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies” (2015: vii). In its emphasis “that the human has always coevolved, coexisted, or collaborated with the nonhuman”, this nonhuman turn differs from its near namesake and contemporary ‘posthuman turn’, which, in Grusin’s view, entails “a claim about teleology or progress in which we begin with the human and see a transformation from the human to the posthuman, after or beyond the human” (ix). This is further propelled, no doubt, by the breakneck speed with which artificial intelligence encroaches on both our everyday routines and realities, which means that “the binary distinction between meaning (human world) and non-meaning (digital systems) is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain” (Bajohr 2024: 48). This has given new fuel to visions of postand transhuman end time, and therefore it is hardly surprising that the discourse about the eventual outcome of this posthuman decentring, or even abdication, of human DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 12 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber 3 MacCormack suggest that the “negative value of the end of anthropocentrism is where the jubilance of the world begins” (2020: 8). Nonetheless, in a move which might strike one as paradoxical, she, too, gives her manifesto an ethical charge as she goes on to invite her (human) readers to “form new terrains of apprehension of the world and encourage new ethical relations between entities” (14). sovereignty is commonly conducted along positively eschatological lines. In one view, anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism are identified as the root causes of all that is wrong with the world today, from species loss to climate catastrophe and the relentless exploitation of ‘natural resources’: Francesca Ferrando, for example, decries anthropocentrism as “a physical and mental dis-ease which is harming us all, as a planet” and celebrates how posthumanism “de-universalizes the human gaze, making it (species-)specific, bringing awareness to historical habits and onto-epistemological premises based on anthropocentric supremacy” (2023: 25, 4). In one of the most radical positions, Patricia MacCormack (2020) even celebrates visions of human extinction as a liberation of the planet. 3 While some, such as Matthew Kirschenbaum, are plagued by visions of a “textpocalypse”, which drowns any meaningful human expression and communication in a maelstrom of artificially generated slop (2024: 328), others are sceptical of such posthuman discourse, seeing this as representative of a “Silicon Valley ideology [which] takes humanist impulses as its starting point, only to transform them into anti-humanist utopias. It begins with the improvement of the human and ends in its final—and inhumane— overcoming” (Nida-Rümelin and Weidenfeld 2022: 5). Our contributions are largely critical of such radical and generalised visions. Instead, they draw on a common set of theoretical touchstones (with Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Jane Bennett and Jacques Derrida prom‐ inently among them), which prompt the decentring of the human not primarily as an abdication of human agency or existence, but rather in terms of an ethical injunction. In this light, an attempt at recovering and representing nonhuman perspectives may not inevitably be doomed to fail but could turn into an urgent ethical obligation. Moreover, such an ethics, as Barad insists, is predicated on a fundamental revision of our understanding of reality. Barad’s “agential realism” is an “an epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and non-human, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices” (2007: 26). “Intra-action” provides the key to this framework, since this term, “in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, […] recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action”. From DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 13 such entanglements, a Baradian term which resonates throughout this volume, “a lively new ontology emerges” (33). In a resounding phrase from Barad’s eponymous book, they challenge us to “meet the universe halfway, to move toward what may come to be in ways that are accountable for our part in the world’s differential becoming” (353) and thus fulfil a responsibility which “entails an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and other, here and there, now and then” (394). Braidotti pushes such somewhat vague ethical implications of nonhuman perspectivity even further, into the realm of political action, when she radicalises the feminist rallying cry “the private is the political” in arguing that “[a]nimals, insects, plants, cells, bacteria, in fact the planet and the cosmos are turned into a political arena” (2021: 113). In their critical readings of texts, films and games, our contributions take up this ethical challenge. What emerges most strongly from the different kinds of engagements with the nonhuman discussed in this volume is an awareness, on the one hand, of the severe limitations of our human capacity to imagine the nonhuman, accompanied, on the other hand, by the recognition of its potential to challenge, to decentre, to rattle. The nonhuman serves here as a space of liminal playfulness which may open possibilities even as it never can (or perhaps even should) become truly nonor posthuman. The ethical questions posed by any decentring of the human, after all, necessarily remain human ones. Does it, then, make no difference what kind of nonhuman is at stake, whether animal, plant, superhuman or material? It does, but there is a surprising breadth of common ground. As the contributions collected here show, it is possible to square the conceptual circle of both allowing for the individuality of specific nonhuman perspectives (be they mermaids, foxes, urns or gusts of wind), while at the same time acknowledging a common posthumanist or more broadly ecocritical concern shared among them. The reactions to our undifferentiated call for nonhuman perspectives bear witness to the expansive range of perspectives encompassed within this term. They also attest to currents of critical convergence and main points of reference that underpin the field covered in this volume: various forms of posthuman thinking, new materialism, critical animal studies, critical plant studies, and (eco)feminism. It speaks to the pressures of the current moment that this shared critical interest privileges some nonhuman perspectives over others. Thus, most of our contributors focus on nonhuman nature, while supernatural or fantastic beings play a comparatively minor role (though a central one in the contributions by Handl and Anderson). Meanwhile, the question whether and to what degree human-created objects or entities can speak as nonhumans emerges as a problem rather than as an assumption (in contributions by Boxhammer, Zähringer and Dowthwaite). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 14 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber Robots, androids or AI are largely absent from these pages, and ghosts are only glimpsed occasionally. Rather than engaging with such borderline cases which cut across the human-nonhuman distinction, our contributors generally start from the unreserved alterity of the nonhuman, acknowledging at the same time that even the very act of assuming a nonhuman perspective might serve to challenge the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. Ultimately, all our contributors turn to nonhuman perspectives for their capacity to challenge human exceptionalism, to take into account nonhuman agency, to interrogate the limits of human agency and to raise pressing questions about a responsible reshaping and reimagining of human-nonhuman relations. Forms of the nonhuman: The structure of this volume In the first section of our volume, “Nonhuman Worldmaking”, we set the scene by situating the human within a nonhuman world in rather general terms. Our contributors here give evidence of the broad framework, conceptual as well as analytical, in which nonhuman perspectivity can be brought to bear to contest and undermine anthropocentric thinking and traditions. Its range extends from medieval romances to late-nineteenth-century short stories and from Romantic urns to contemporary video games. Jochen Achilles’s article helpfully starts out by demarcating some important terminological boundaries which map the theoretical field within which the bulk of our contributions operate. He clarifies distinctions between anthropocentric transhuman and ecocentric postand ahuman conceptions in contemporary ecological theories and finds a precursor to current concerns in Sarah Orne Jewett’s nineteenth-century short story “A White Heron” (1886). In his reading of the story he demonstrates that anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches to the nature-culture dyad always represent discursively and historically differ‐ ent responses to cultural and social transformation. Against the unstoppable advance of industrial civilisation and informed by the civilisational crisis this involves, so Achilles argues, “A White Heron” celebrates the power of human relinquishment to the nonhuman. Turning not to nature, but to art, James Dowthwaite’s contribution revisits a revered classic of the English literary canon, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. He explores the human-nonhuman relationship that Keats sets up in relation to his famous “unravished bride of silence”, and asks what this relationship tells us about the identity between truth and beauty. In doing so, and provocatively bucking the trend of most of the other contributions to this volume, Dowthwaite makes the argument that the urn’s nonhuman perspective might actually abet DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 15 the recovery of a sense of the human, as the nonhuman object of the artwork can only speak through the creative license of the imaginative poet. With this claim, Dowthwaite reminds us forcibly not to lose sight of the always human nature of the cultural objects under consideration. Julia Boll’s contribution takes us back even further in history. Her analysis of the fourteenth-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and David Lowery’s film adaptation (2021), focuses on the interplay of human and nonhuman agency in a mythic, war-torn landscape, where human presence is often reduced to mere traces or apparitions. By disrupting anthropocentric perspectives and foregrounding nonhuman agencies, Boll argues, the film reconfigures medieval motifs to address contemporary questions of agency, morality, and boundaries between human and animal worlds, emphasising the autonomy of nature and spectral forces. The landscapes which are in the focus of Xaver Boxhammer’s article are, likewise, torn and devastated. He examines the post-apocalyptic platforming adventure game Rain World (2017) as an example of nonhuman-oriented game design, in so far as it creates strange environments and systems indifferent to the individual player, with the aim of deconstructing notions of human exceptionalism. By means of its complex story, fragmented narrative discourse, procedural simulation and emergent creature behaviour, Boxhammer shows, Rain World subverts the conventional anthropocentric paradigm that players can demand total comprehension and mastery from the video games they play. The next section of this volume, “Gender and the Nonhuman”, acknowledges a cultural history in which women have long been situated at the margins of what is properly human. It thus shifts the focus towards a subject which has, arguably since the mythical stories around Pandora or Pygmalion but more specifically in the wake of Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”, intersected particularly fruitfully with issues around human-nonhuman distinctions: gen‐ der and desire. Paul Fagan’s contribution neatly illustrates the interrelatedness of these different manifestations of nonhuman discourse. He undertakes an ecofeminist reading of Virginia Woolf’s influential 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, suggesting to understand Woolf ’s essay not so much as a precursor to but a turn in the ecofeminist essay tradition. He interprets the nonhuman perspectives in Woolf ’s essay - from the embodied subjectivity of a Manx cat to the imagined viewpoint of an extra-terrestrial alien - as ruptures that grant her narrator a queer, planetary and even apocalyptic vantage point on the gendered writing traditions she is tracing as well as productively resituating her considerations of women’s socio-economic oppression within the more-than-human world. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 16 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber The final two articles in this section both project their negotiation of nonhu‐ man perspectivity onto figures from the realm of myth. Laura Handl traces the functions of femme anger in two novels by Natalie Haynes, and Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which she labels as ‘monster’ narratives. The ‘monstrous’ female protagonists of both novels, Handl argues, reflect their subject position in relation to a heteropatriarchal social system, but do not identify as human. Thus extracting themselves from human (narrative as well as social) conventions, they emphasise the sociocultural functions of gendering emotions in the service of discriminatory politics of othering and silencing. Emily Anderson focuses on Monique Roffey’s 2020 novel The Mermaid of Black Conch to suggest that employing fantastic creatures such as mermaids can give rise to a re-evaluation of what it means to be human and what it means to be a human living in the Anthropocene. A magical realist setting, Anderson argues, in which such fantastic creatures as the mermaid can effortlessly exist within human ‘reality’ helps to explore the potential as well as the limitations of destabilising anthropocentric attitudes. Engaging with the mermaid’s super‐ natural presence and more-than-human perspective challenges binaries such as the animal vs. the human and the magical vs. the scientific, on which such assumptions frequently rest. Troubling the animal-human distinction in particular is the central concern of the next section, “Animal Perspectives”, which takes a closer look at what has historically been one of the principle scenes for negotiating nonhuman perspectivity: encounters between (speaking or anthropomorphic) animals and humans. Animality, as Tobias Menely argues, figures as “the ‘first’ symbol: the trope of the other within the same, of the exception to the rule, of the unbridgeable distance and uncanny proximity among the living” (2015: 5), and Kari Weil maintains that animals “are at the very origin of our systems of representation” (2012: 12). As our closest nonhuman other, the animal is both the most familiar nonhuman interlocutor and the one who challenges human exceptionalism most directly. Wolfgang Funk elaborates on this challenge by drawing on Derrida’s seminal essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am”, situating its argument in the broader field of animal studies. On this basis, he centres on the perspective of one particular animal, the fox, to investigate contemporary literary attempts by Jasper Fforde, Sarah Hall and George Saunders to address the role of the animal in this our paradoxically posthuman Anthropocene. In doing so, Funk examines how these fictional encounters emphasise the blurring of boundaries between human and nonhuman animals, the role language plays in this renegotiation as well as the human effect on the shared environment. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 17 The next contribution likewise engages with Derrida and a variety of animals addressing humankind, this time, however, in poetry. Irmtraud Huber deploys a range of poems from the eighteenth century to the present to explore poetry’s ability to engage with nonhuman perspectives. In spite of the anthropocentrism which such endeavours can easily be accused of, she argues, lyric brevity and, in particular, the indirection of lyric address productively invites an imaginative turning of the gaze in epiphanic moments of shared vulnerability. Raphael Zähringer investigates a similar dialectic of defamiliarisation and empathy. Examining the video game Stray for the potential of nonhuman perspectives in digital media to decentre the human, he demonstrates how the game enacts a form of free indirect affect that merges interpersonal and intra‐ personal relationality across species and ontologies. Stray blends familiarity and estrangement to challenge anthropocentric assumptions while at the same time embracing the affective and relational dynamics of its characters. Under the heading “Material Perspectives”, the final section of the volume engages with perspectives that are arguably harder to anthropomorphise than foxes, mice or stray cats, such as microbes, plants and the weather. It sets out to investigate how material forms “interact with each other and with the human dimension”, thus producing what Serenella Iovino calls “configurations of meanings and discourses that we can interpret as ‘stories’” (2015: 71). Even though anthropomorphism can be said to pose a central challenge and problem for literary engagements with animal perspectives, in her seminal study Vibrant Matter, Bennett argues for the need to “cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism - the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature - to counter the narcissism of human in charge of the world” (2010: xvi). A failure to acknowledge the “vitality of matter”, Bennett suggests, “prevent[s] us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies” (ix). There are no nonhuman speakers in this section; instead, the contributions show that foregrounding the nonhuman involves a change of perspective: “If matter is agentic, and endowed with meanings”, Iovino reminds us, “every material formation, from bodies to their contexts of living, is ‘telling’, and therefore can be the object of a critical investigation aimed at discovering its stories, its material and discursive interplays, its place in a world filled with expressive - or narrative - forces” (2015: 70; original emphasis). Taking their cue from such a call, our contributors in this section trace and assess various kinds of nonhuman agencies. Introducing a historical as well as contemporary perspective, Sina Schuh‐ maier’s contribution demonstrates how human existence is, and always has DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 18 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber been, inextricably entangled with microbial forms. The ‘microbial turn’ which she diagnoses, calls for a radical shift in perspective, toward a post-anthropo‐ centrism that acknowledges shared agencies, altered scales, transcorporeal exchanges and ecological interdependencies. Taking recourse to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), she argues that the human, in this account, becomes a participant in a contagious event that involves nonhuman matter, (human) corporeality, the city infrastructure, divine agency and discourse. Similarly linking aerial phenomena with a sense of (human) time and transi‐ toriness, Alexander Scherr next develops an account of British Romanticism’s close entanglements of cultural and natural climates. Focusing on the role of aerial nonhuman actors such as winds, clouds and breezes in Romantic poetry, he traces an emerging awareness of long-lasting changes to the earth’s atmosphere that were inaugurated by the onset of industrial pollution. He reads poems by Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as embodying not only the spirit of their more immediate historical surroundings but also, on a larger geological scale, the air of the Anthropocene. Ending this section and our volume with a contemporary literary take on the interaction of humankind with its material environment, Sarah Wegener examines Lauren/ Wren James’s young adult cli-fi novel Green Rising (2021) as exemplary for imagining what she calls a zoe-centred network, constituted by a web of fungi which functions as a nonhuman neuronal network and displays forms of self-aware and independent organic intelligence. By enabling a form of (intra-)organic communication, Wegener argues, such ‘collaboration’ is apt to present the posthuman subject in its final stage of assemblage, even while the literary genre conventions of the text end up undermining to an extent its disruptive potential. With its utopian imaginary, its attempt to develop a narrative perspective that is post-anthropocentric, relational and escapes from the bounds of the individual subject, but also with its ultimate failure to uphold such a perspective within the genre conventions of YA fiction, James’s novel, or Wegener’s reading of it, aptly summarises the main tendencies of this entire volume: the utopian hope which turns to the nonhuman as a prompt for a new ethics of relationality and the concomitant painful awareness of the immense difficulty of realising such hope. Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. 2002. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 19 Alber, Jan. 2016. Unnatural Narrative. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Armbruster, Karla. 2012. “What Do We Want from Talking Animals? : Reflections on Literary Representations of Animal Voices and Minds”. In: DeMello, Margo, ed. Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing. New York: Routledge, 1-17. Bajohr, Hannes. 2024. “Dumb Meaning: Machine Learning and Artificial Semantics”. In: Voigts, Eckart/ Auer, Robin Markus/ Elflein, Dietmar/ Kunas, Sebastian/ Röhnert, Jan/ Seeliger, Christoph, eds. Artificial Intelligence - Intelligent Art? : Human-Machine Interaction and Creative Practice. Bielefeld: transcript, 45-57. Baker, Timothy C. 2019. Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC/ London: Duke University Press. Bellamy, Liz. 1998. Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bernaerts, Lars/ Caracciolo, Marco/ Herman, Luc/ Varveck, Bart. 2014. “The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators”. Narrative 22/ 1, 68-93. Braidotti, Rosi. 2021. “Posthuman Feminism and Gender Methodology”. In: Browne, Jude, ed. Why Gender? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 101-125. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”. Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28/ 2, 369-418. Ferrando, Francesca. 2023. The Art of Being Posthuman: Who are We in the 21st Century? Cambridge/ Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press. Fforde, Jasper. 2020. The Constant Rabbit. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Fudge, Erica. 2000. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. Houndmills: Macmillan. Fudge, Erica. 2002. “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals”. In: Rothfels, Nigel, ed. Representing Animals. Bloomington, IN/ Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 3-18. Grusin, Richard. 2015. “Introduction”. In: Grusin, Richard, ed. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, vii-xxix. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Iovino, Serenella. 2015. “The Living Diffractions of Matter and Text: Narrative Agency, Strategic Anthropomorphism, and how Interpretation Works”. Anglia 133/ 1, 69-86. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2024. “Facsimile Machines”. Poetics Today 45/ 2, 325-329. MacCormack, Patricia. 2020. The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthro‐ pocene. London: Bloomsbury Academic. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 20 Wolfgang Funk and Irmtraud Huber Menely, Tobias. 2015. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. Chi‐ cago/ London: The University of Chicago Press. Morgan, Edwin. 1990. “The Dolphin’s Song”. In: Collected Poems: 1949-1987. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 564. Nida-Rümelin, Julian/ Weidenfeld, Nathalie. 2022. Digital Humanism: For a Humane Transformation of Democracy, Economy and Culture in the Digital Age. Cham: Springer. Norris, Margot. 2019. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Ortiz Robles, Mario. 2016. Literature and Animal Studies. London/ New York: Routledge. Sebo, Erin. 2018. In Enigmate. The History of a Riddle, 400-1500. Chicago: Four Courts Press. Weil, Kari. 2012. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York: Columbia University Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthu‐ manist Theory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wolfe, Cary. 2009. “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities”. PMLA 124/ 2, 564-575. Zunshine, Lisa. 2008. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0001 In Search of the Nonhuman 21 Nonhuman Worldmaking Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities: Theoretical Conceptions and Literary Anticipations Jochen Achilles Current trajectories of cultural transformation This article discusses the alternative between anthropocentric transhuman and ecocentric postand ahuman conceptions in contemporary ecological theories. Late nineteenth-century short fiction, informed by the civilisational crisis of industrial developments, presents alternatives between ecoand anthropocen‐ trism, which anticipate these theoretical positions. Both anthropocentric and ecocentric approaches to the nature-culture dyad are discursively and histori‐ cally different responses to cultural transformation, which either interrelate in liminal processes (Turner 1967; 1982; 2011) or make use of heterotopic third spaces (Foucault 1986; Oldenburg 2023; Soja 1999). In different accentuations, postand transhuman theories pursue trajectories of such transformations of the contemporary world. While some of these approaches unequivocally represent either postor transhuman options, others occupy a fuzzy middle ground, oscillating between postand transhuman poles. Concepts of liminality, heterotopia, and third place or space are relevant in this context, as they describe processes, spheres, and sites of such transformative negotiations and the ways in which either processual developments or spatial arrangements or both initiate alternatives to the social and cultural status quo. In “Thinking with Liminality” (2015), Bjørn Thomassen argues that “liminality refers to something very simple and universal: the experience of finding oneself at a boundary or in an in-between position, either spatially or temporally. […] Simply put, liminality is about how human beings, in their various social and cultural contexts, deal with change” (2015: 40; see also 2018: 71-110 and Bräunlein 2012: 49-61). Both transhuman positionings, based on the acceleration of technological progress, and posthuman tendencies, questioning human development, enter liminal phases and/ or seek out heterotopic communal spaces. As liminality DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 1 In more pragmatic fashion than Foucault, Ray Oldenburg describes third places as heterotopic sanctuaries with transformative potential (2023: 35). More radically, Edward Soja develops a notion of thirdspace, which liminally encompasses the highly conflictual interrelation of material givens and imaginary desirables (1999: 276). 2 While Kirsch indiscriminately describes ecocentric approaches as Anthropocene anti‐ humanism, I distinguish between ahuman approaches, which aim for a world without humans, and posthuman approaches, which aim for a redefined relationship between humans and the nonhuman world. “may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise" (Turner 1967: 97), Victor Turner considers it a process of fermentation in which hitherto unknown formations shape themselves, “a temporal interface whose properties partially invert those of the already consolidated order which constitutes any specific cultural ‘cosmos’“ (1982: 41). Liminal processes often go along with displacements and manifest themselves in special environments. In “Of Other Spaces” (1986), Michel Foucault defines such spaces, set off from the everyday world, as heterotopic “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites […] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). 1 They provide what Turner calls communitas, “society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community or even communion” as opposed to structure, “society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-eco‐ nomic positions” (Turner 2011: 96). It is the contention of this essay that such liminal and heterotopic structures are key to theoretical negotiations of postand transhumanism and their respective prefigurations in nineteenth-century fiction. In The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us (2023), Adam Kirsch distinguishes these conflicting current conceptions of progress in the following terms: Anthropocene antihumanism […] is a rejection of humanity’s traditional role as Earth’s protagonist, the most important being in creation. Transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the very things that antihumanism decries - scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of reason. But it believes that the only way forward for humanity is to create new forms of intelligent life that will no longer be Homo sapiens. (11 f.) 2 In different ways, postor antihumanism on the one hand and transhumanism on the other want to create worlds from which humans have disappeared: “Antihumanists believe that the universe doesn’t need to include consciousness DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 26 Jochen Achilles for its existence to be meaningful. […] Transhumanists, by contrast, believe the universe would be meaningless without minds to experience and understand it” (82). Postor antihumanism includes the subject in the object, transhumanism includes the object in the subject (Achilles 2005), procedures which both require a decentring of the human. From an ecocentric perspective, Lawrence Buell distinguishes two forms of relinquishment to nature in The Environmental Imagination (1995). The more moderate version sacrifices complex tools and objects and leads to an unbuilding of civilisation, as it were. In an anticipation of postand ahuman tendencies, the second form of relinquishment amounts to a dissolution of human subjectivity in nature: “The more radical relinquishment is to give up individual autonomy itself, to forgo the illusion of mental and even bodily apartness from one’s environment” (144). While aor posthumanists strive for Buell’s more radical relinquishment to nonhuman nature or matter, transhumanists invert the ecocentric thrust of Buell’s concept altogether and envision a renunciation of the human for man-made but nonhuman minds and forms of artificial intelligence. The final objective of these forms of relinquish‐ ment, the reconciliation of the human and the nonhuman, is clearly definable, but its achievement is tied to transitional phases and manifests itself in boundary crossings. These often provisional and experimental processes represent forms of liminality. In the following, the distinction between a-, postand transhuman positions will first be explored in current theories, before its nascent manifestations, embedded in late nineteenth-century short fiction, will be discussed. The second part of the essay will specifically focus on Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” (1886) as an outstanding example of the ways in which nineteenth-century American short fiction anticipates twenty-first -century ecological theories. The analysis of “A White Heron” will also highlight generic differences between the mimetic representation of affective involvement, individual growth, and decision-making in narratives as opposed to the abstract and generalising conceptualisations of theories. The opposition of ahumanism and transhumanism Ahuman approaches are designed to help establish an ecocentric world without humans. While Michael Boulter’s Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man (2002), David Benatar’s Better Never To Have Been (2006), and Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) make steps in this direction, the most radical expression of ahumanism is Patricia MacCormack’s Ahuman Manifesto (2020), not an academic treatise but “a book which calls for action. Direct, available and DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities 27 immediate action” (ix). The ultimate aim is “the cessation of human existence” (5), “the end of humans” (7; see also Kirsch 2023: 33 ff., 42 f.). MacCormack wants to terminate the “anthropocentric privileging of human practice” (2020: 2 f.) by the establishment of ever-widening experimental third spaces, which allow for the liminal development towards human extinction. The disappearance of humanity is not to be effected by sudden violent destruction but by a kind of re-education programme in communal third spaces, which will gradually lead to its demise: “A call to action with no end in sight” (10). The activist implications of this suggestion are realised by Australian ecotheorists Val Plumwood and Simon Springer and the alternative shadow communities they suggest (Plumwood 2008: 139; Springer 2016: 288 f.). In Death Activism (2025), her most recent book, MacCormack likewise re-emphasises posthuman community building. A secular version of eating from the tree of knowledge is described as the original sin of anthropocentrism and the end of the primal edenic state of indivisibility and the spontaneous and peaceful interaction of all organisms on earth (MacCormack 2020: 24-27). The freedom of unpremeditated, instinctive growth has been replaced by systemic, preplanned order. In Turner’s terms, the communitas of the prehuman natural has been superseded by the structure of anthropocentrism (2011: 96) - a historical process which MacCormack wants to see reversed. As Turner anticipates communal third spaces and liminal spheres marked by the liberality and egalitarianism of the civil rights and student movements, MacCormack imagines an ahuman Golden Age that existed before the advent of humans and will be restored after they disappear. Her notions of the dynamics in a world without humans remain projections of an imagined prehuman past into an equally imagined ahuman future. MacCormack’s stance suggests an ethics of “leaving be” and “becoming-other” (2020: 13, 15), which can only be articulated aesthetically in forms of art. If rationality is epistemologically unable to adequately comprehend the object world and therefore decried as the medium of anthropocentric disregard for the nonhuman, only art remains to anticipate what cannot be articulated discursively. As an attempt to envision a world without humans, ahuman art is either characterised by Beckettian minimalism or the uncanniness of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction (MacCormack 2020: 96 and 2025: 171-188). While both postand ahumanism are bent on a reduction of human interven‐ tions in the ecosphere, transhumanism as ardently embraces the perfection of scientific accomplishments in the shape of a universal cyber-spiritualisation, which makes the human disappear in its own electronic enhancements. On the basis of scientific and technological progress, the “Transhumanist Declaration (2012)” envisions “the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 28 Jochen Achilles aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth” and advocates “the right to modify and enhance one’s body, cognition, and emotions” (2013: 54, 55; see Kirsch 2023: 54-57). As early as 1993, Vernor Vinge describes these transformations as an epochal change “comparable to the rise of human life on Earth” (2013: 365). As both superintelligent machines may be developed and humans may technologically be inconceivably enhanced, an unprecedented transcendent stage may be reached, which Vinge calls the Singularity: “It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules” (366; see Kirsch 2023: 75). Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005) reinforces Vinge’s position by stressing the immense power of human and machine intelligence combined, “the merger of the vast knowledge embedded in our own brains with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our technology” (20), which, in his view, will bring about the Singularity and replace evolution (374). Matter will be suffused and endowed with intelligence; the difference between mind and matter will disappear, as the difference between technology and biology has already disappeared (Kurzweil 2005: 21). Marc Andreessen’s “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (2023) shares with Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near the unshakeable belief in the world’s salvation by the speeding-up of technological progress. Andreessen sees the Singularity realised in largely economic terms: “We believe the market economy is a dis‐ covery machine, a form of intelligence - an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system. We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward”. Andreessen’s transhuman creed is based on the adoration of scientific progress to a degree that paradoxically transforms science itself into a religion. His transhuman techno-optimism, ush‐ ering in a technologically empowered and thereby redeemed universe in which reality and virtuality are synonyms, is diametrically opposed to MacCormack’s ahuman relinquishment and the generation of a universe liberated from humans. Both conceptions generate liminalities of their own. MacCormack’s measures of ahuman liberation are not so far away from totalitarian programs of ethnic cleansing, while Kurzweil’s and Andreessen’s utopias of digital enhancement shade off into religious creeds of technological redemption. Liminal negotiations of posthumanism and transhumanism There are approaches to the interrelation of civilisational progress and eco‐ logical sustainability which are less unidirectional than both MacCormack’s ahumanism and Kurzweil’s or Andreessen’s transhumanism. They rather try to DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities 29 3 Many contemporary philosophers, Wolfgang Welsch among them, adhere to the Kantian ineluctability of reason. As we “don’t get a view from outside of reason, but only from inside reason - with reason itself being the agent of this view and hence, for this act, its unobjectifiable background”, Welsch emphasises the impossibility to transcend reasoning, which always remains “the opaque background and medium of each of its acts” (2022). negotiate this relationship by suggestions of ambivalence. Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) (2018) lays the epistemological groundwork for the negotiation between subject and object, humans and nonhumans. It posits the aesthetic and, more narrowly, performative and theatrical accessibility of the object world by a process of the metaphoric substitution of things in themselves by the human observer (Kirsch 2023: 38 ff.). Based on an essay by Ortega y Gasset, Harman develops an aesthetic theory that tries to overcome and remedy the withdrawal and opacity of objects. The metaphor’s observer or reader stands in for the withdrawn and inaccessible real object by identifying with it. The observer turns into an element of the metaphor by histrionic identification with her role: “[I]n art the part of the image which looks towards the object is subordinated to our efforts, as basically thespian beings, to become the new object generated by the metaphor” (Harman 2018: 85). If such leapfrogging of the rift between subject and object is possible, things in themselves become comprehensible in ways both Descartes and Kant deem impossible. But the claim that cognitive processes become compounds with elements of the object world, which almost reduces them to things, cannot detract from the fact that the human perspective is inevitably implicated in the cognition of the thingness of things. With regard to the observer, Harman argues that in the aesthetic experience of metaphor, “we are always the only real objects on the scene (despite our inability to see ourselves directly), given that cypresses, flames and red boxes are never directly graspable by us or by anything else” (Harman 2018: 100 f.). Defining the human observer as an actor, who produces the compounds of real things and sensual qualities, Harman seems to return to the exceptionalism of human cognition. 3 But he presents object-oriented ontology “as an extremely broad method […] that rescues the non-relational core of every object, thus paving the way for an aesthetic conception of things” (256; original emphasis). Only the aesthetic approach via the performative substitution of the observer for the object allows for the relinquishment of subjective cognitive conditions. Humans can surrender what categorically differentiates them from the object world and identify with objects by enacting them (88 f., 260) instead of trying to capture thingness by human apperception and categorisation, which unavoidably also DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 30 Jochen Achilles 4 Emmanuel Levinas also uses the term unthought: “It is above all to search for and recall […] the human or interhuman intrigue which is the concreteness of its unthought […], which is the necessary ‘staging’ (‘mise en scène’) from which the abstractions are detached in the said of words and propositions” (Levinas 1996: 158; original emphasis). Levinas’s and Hayles’s concepts of unthought have in common that they both opt for modes of thought which transform and even reverse the conventional understanding of cognition. obscures this thingness. Only in their aesthetic experience of metaphor humans truly become compounds with the object world. Total relinquishment in an act of metaphoric substitution transforms subjects into quasi-objects, a posthuman trajectory also pursued in less epistemological accentuations by Katherine Hayles, Jane Bennett, and Donna Haraway. In the spirit of Harman’s epistemological egalitarianism, Hayles opens up a liminal third space between the human and the nonhuman, “a radical rethinking of cognition from the ground up” (2017: 1). In her study Unthought (2017), she concentrates on “nonconscious cognitive processes inaccessible to conscious introspection but nevertheless essential for consciousness to function” (1; Kirsch 2023: 61 f.). Hayles’s concept of unthought transcends boundaries and negotiates the threshold of human and nonhuman cognition, as it draws attention to a form of thinking which is liminally itself and not itself: “the terra incognita that beckons beyond our received notions of how consciousness operates” (1). 4 Nonconscious cognition bridges the gap between biological and technical systems. It “is a much broader faculty present to some degree in all biological life-forms and many technical systems” (14), which processes information faster than consciousness and recognises patterns too complex to be discerned by consciousness (10). Hayles focuses on “nonconscious cognitive assemblages” (2), which “function as systems, with well-defined interfaces and communication circuits between sensors, actuators, processors, storage media and distribution networks, and which include human, biological, technical, and material components” (2; original emphasis). She wants to explore the “planetary cognitive ecology” (3; original emphasis) shaped by such assemblages: “Once we overcome the (mis)perception that humans are the only important or relevant cognizers on the planet, a wealth of new questions, issues, and ethical considerations come into view” (10 f.), which constitute a paradigm change in the broader context of this planetary cognitive ecology. As the transformative aspect of Turner’s liminality tries to open up new societal dimensions, Hayles tries to develop posthuman perspectives, a novel sense of what is real, by the exploration of interrelations between, and common textures of, the bioand the technosphere. Nonconscious DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities 31 cognition emerges as the liminal zone, which, in Turner’s words, “is neither this nor that, and yet is both” (1967: 99). Hayles envisions a planetary reconciliation of technological praxis and the biosphere on the basis of largely nonconscious cognitive harmonisation (Hayles 2017: 31 ff.). Expanding the planetary cognitive ecology suggested by Hayles, Bennett’s study Vibrant Matter (2010) is arguably the most comprehensive attempt to negotiate the threshold of mind and matter and to reconcile the human and the nonhuman (Kirsch 2023: 41 f.). Bennett wants to separate and disengage us from well-worn assumptions about the lifelessness of materiality, sensitise us to liminal uncertainties and, finally, lead us to a changed worldview. To trigger this process, which resembles Turner’s description of initiation (1967: 94), she tries to open our eyes to hitherto unrecognised and unacknowledged aspects of reality, to what she calls the vitality of nonhuman bodies: By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things - edibles, commodities, storms, metals […] to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans. (Bennett 2010: viii) Similar to Harman’s object-oriented ontology (OOO), Bennett promotes “more attentive encounters between people-materialities and thing-materialities” as well as the abandonment of “the onto-theological binaries of life/ matter, hu‐ man/ animal, will/ determination, and organic/ inorganic” (x). She claims the affectivity of organic “and inorganic bodies, natural and cultural objects” (xii) This “impersonal affect or material vibrancy” (xiii) is not to be understood as a power that infiltrates matter, a divine gift provided by a spiritual force, but as a quality that inheres: “I equate affect with materiality, rather than posit a separate force that can enter and animate a physical body” (xiii). The aim is “a monism” which “posits neither a smooth harmony of parts nor a diversity unified by a common spirit” (xi). In and of itself, Bennett claims, matter is endowed with agency similar to that of humans and must therefore be respected like these humans. Bennett defines configurations of human and nonhuman elements as “hu‐ man-nonhuman assemblages” (xvii, see 5 f., 21). They are “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent pres‐ ence of energies that confound them from within” (23 f.). The human and nonhuman participants in such assemblages become blurred as distinct entities and assume a liminal, transitory existence in processes of becoming and transition (49). Bennett names Franz Kafka’s fiction as a literary representation DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 32 Jochen Achilles 5 In American nineteenth-century literature, Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up” (1839) and Hawthorne’s “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend” (1852) are equally apt examples (Benesch 2002: 122-126). of the dynamics of what she calls thing-power, “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects” (6, see 7 f.). 5 Her study ends on a religious note, with a metaphysical rather than material creed, a kind of prayer to “one-matter energy, the maker of things seen and unseen. I believe that this pluriverse is traversed by heterogeneities that are continually doing things” (122; original emphasis). Like Andreessen’s transhumanism, Bennett’s posthumanism meanders into the intelligible spheres of a religion, in which distinctions tend to melt indiscriminately. But unlike Andreessen, both Hayles and Bennett suggest a liminal coexistence of the human and the nonhuman instead of a sublation of the human in transhuman cybernetic systems. From diverse angles, Haraway tries to reconcile an anthropocentric focus on human sensibilities and technological progress with an ecocentric focus on materiality and animality. In “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991), she describes the cyborg as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (149) that weds both technology and social reality to nature in hitherto unprecedented form. Cyborgs may well be a premonition of the harmonisation of humans, animals, and machines: “we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. […] There is no fundamental ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic” (177; see Kirsch 2023: 61 f.). In her Companion Species Manifesto (2003), Haraway joins cyborgs and nonhuman animal companion species in “co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all. […] There is no foundation” (12). Fleshing out this conceptualisation of “naturecultures” (12), Haraway devel‐ ops a utopia (which some may consider a dystopia) of interspecies symbiosis in Staying with the Trouble (2016). Not unlike nineteenth-century fiction writers and MacCormack in her Ahuman Manifesto, she uses a narrative method in “stories that are also speculative fabulations” (Haraway 2016: 10). Haraway names “science fiction and fantasy, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, and string figures” (28) as the most potent motivational impulses for the gener‐ ation of interspecies relationships and syntheses, which produce symbionts and quantitatively diminish humanity. The task is to make “kin as oddkin” for “mul‐ tispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human-beings in kinship” (2). Haraway envisions the empowerment of animals by genetic technology, a procedure which combines ecoand anthropocentrism and syn‐ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities 33 6 The discussion of Haraway is based on Achilles 2025: 37 ff. thesises her cyborg and companion species manifestoes. The implantation of genetic material from animals in humans is to generate symbionts, in-between species. In Haraway’s view, this process has to remain unidirectional, which leaves the animals genetically unchanged (147). Only humans will be altered and become animal-like, preferably by genes from endangered species like the monarch butterfly, Haraway’s prime example of making oddkin. Humans will gradually merge with other species and be absorbed into the animal world to the point of their own disappearance as a distinct species. The one-sidedness of Haraway’s symbiotic merging renders her approach object-oriented and ecocentric, as it privileges nonhuman animals, while humanity is to vanish as such. Haraway exemplifies her vision by “The Camille Stories: Children of Com‐ post”, a narrative sci-fi utopia about the achievement of ecological balance, which can also be read as a dystopia of manipulative disfigurement. Her multigenerational story (134-168) follows the implantation of monarch butter‐ fly genes into an imaginary child called Camille, a child “who had no truck with conventional genders or with human exceptionalism. This was a child born for sympoiesis—for becoming-with and making-with a motley clutch of earth others” (137). The repetition of such genetic manipulation in subsequent generations of Camille’s descendants will gradually reduce their humanness, until they melt into a butterfly world which is thereby also increasingly less recognisable as such. 6 Both Hayles and Bennett suggest convergences of the human and the nonhuman based on common forms of cognition and vitality. Their theories aim at enduring negotiations and interpenetrations, a sustainable harmonisation leading to the continued interplay of humans, nonhumans, and matter, all of which are involved in what Arpad Szakolczai has described as the perma‐ nent liminality of modernity (2016). In Haraway’s Camille stories, humans become symbionts by means of genetic engineering, a technological move meant to redeem nature by making humanity vanish. In Kurzweil’s vision of singularity, the interface of non-biological and biological intelligences redeems humans by their self-transcendence into cyber-intelligence. Hayles and Bennett want humans and nonhumans to interrelate and persist. MacCormack and Haraway strive for a natural world in which human intervention plays a substantially reduced role, or, preferably, no role at all. Kurzweil and Andreessen desire a spiritualised universe, in which nature and humans have become hyper-intelligent machines. While Hayles and Bennett emphasise the common DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 34 Jochen Achilles ground of cognising and vibrancy that ties humans and nonhumans together, MacCormack’s aand Haraway’s posthumanism as well as Kurzweil and Andreessen’s transhumanism make humans disappear, either tracelessly or by the triumph of the technologically enhanced reason that purportedly used to distinguish them from nonhumans. Neurological insights and technological processes develop liminal spheres of indistinguishability. In the second part of this article, the scrutiny of Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” will reveal a conflict between ecoand anthropocentric attitudes towards nature which can be considered to foreshadow the discrepancies discussed between, on the one hand, aand posthuman forms of relinquishment and, on the other, variants of techno-optimism. On environmentalism in American short fiction MacCormack’s recourse to absurdist and surreal literary expression as a fore‐ shadowing of the world without us, Harman’s object cognition as an aesthetic process involving metaphoric structures, Hayles’s conviction that nonconscious cognition is “appropriate for humanistic inquiry” (2017: 208), Bennett’s refer‐ ence to Kafka as a witness of thing-power, and Haraway’s Camille stories about genetic engineering are so many indications of the interdependence of theoretical statements about future developments and their aesthetic represen‐ tations in art. The commonalities of contemporary environmental theories and (short) fiction vary in the degree of their being apparent or indirect, declaratory or embedded in polyvalent plots. Even if sometimes vague or opaque, these correlations are noteworthy as symptoms of the persistence of ecological conflicts. Science fiction and also a number of American short stories address shifts in the relationship of humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment in both ecoand anthropocentric accentuations. Cases in point are Flannery O’Connor’s “A View of the Woods” (1957), Thomas Pynchon’s “Entropy” (1960), and Native American stories such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Lullaby” (1981), which suggests an embedding of human concerns in a planetary context - a stance taken up in contemporary theory by Plumwood, who draws on Australian indigenous lifestyles and models of place relationship in order to further posthuman developments (2008: 143 ff.). In the nineteenth century, stories such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844) anticipate the transhuman trajectory of unfettered technological progress from the angle of a youthful nerd, an unconventional watchmaker, who tries to transcend the limitations of materiality. Sounding like Kurzweil and Andreessen, his both DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities 35 artistic and scientific program amounts to “’the spiritualization of matter’” (Hawthorne 1982: 917; see 922). Towards the end of the nineteenth and turn to the twentieth century, a range of regionalist short stories address the attitudinal shifts in the interrelations of people and their environment, consequent upon the transition from a largely agrarian United States to an industrial country dominated by technological progress and capitalist economic structures. While the contemporary theories discussed are based on theoretical generalisation claiming planetary relevance, these stories are locally specific and focus on the representation of individual fate. Among them are Hamlin Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw” (1891) and Frank Norris’s “A Deal in Wheat” (1902), Midwestern stories which contrast, on the one hand, the land as a spiritual ambience embedding and nourishing humans and, on the other, its capitalist commodification as a soulless source of gain. By contrast, Mark Twain’s “Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn” (1880) humorously presents the ways in which an isolated and lonesome California coal miner tries to make good on his claim that he can effortlessly understand and translate jay language (Achilles 2007). While Garland’s and Norris’s stories show ecocentric tendencies by their criticism of abuses of the land, Twain’s tall tale celebrates anthropocentric self-deception as a therapy for loneliness. The following pages will focus on another narrative thematising the relation‐ ship of humans and animals. Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” is both her “most anthologized and best-known story” (Griffith, Jr. 1985: 22). In terms of Ferdinand Tönnies’s distinction between community and society, Louis Renza places “A White Heron” in a threshold situation, in which “the simply organized, communal, agrarian-like Gemeinschaft society was on the verge of becoming an already passé American myth in the face of the complex culture or Gesellschaft of postbellum American society” (1984: 44; 43-72). In this regard, “A White Heron” maps out the conflict between, on the one hand, pastoral, preindustrial, and regionalist Jeffersonian agrarianism and, on the other, Federalist industrialisa‐ tion and urbanisation, driven by scientific positivism and utilitarianism. The story negotiates aggressively possessive and spiritually relinquishing attitudes towards nature - a conflict played out by a very limited cast of characters on the minuscule stage of a remote and secluded small farm protected from urban turmoil. In the guise of a story of (premature) initiation, “A White Heron” can nevertheless be read as a complex treatment of the theoretical concerns outlined in the first part of this essay. The story emphasises the power of human relinquishment vis-à-vis the seemingly unstoppable advance of a civilisation based on technological progress and commercial success. Contemporary eco- DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 36 Jochen Achilles 7 On this transition, see also Brenzo 1978: 36 f.; Held 1982: 58; Heller 1990: 186 and Smith 1983: 38f. and anthropocentric, postand transhuman options widen this playing field enormously but also continue what such stories anticipate. “A White Heron”: Environmental conflict on a Maine farm “A White Heron” is the story of nine-year-old Sylvia who has moved from the household of her mother in a “crowded manufacturing town” ( Jewett 1992: 198) to her grandmother’s heterotopic and secluded small farm in the woods of Maine. Her grandmother describes Sylvia’s transition from city to country, “as if she never had been alive at all before she came to the farm” (198). 7 Sylvia has left the uninviting urban world behind and on her grandmother’s farm lives in harmony with a natural environment, which appears anthropomorphically spirited. A crow lived near the farm “’that did seem to have reason same as folks’” (200) and trees are “full of little birds and beasts that seemed to be […] saying good-night to each other in sleepy twitters“ (198). Correspondingly, Sylvia melts into this environment. She adopts the sleepiness of the birds (198 f.) and, anticipating Bennett’s vibrant materiality, feels “as if she were part of the gray shadows and of moving leaves” (199; see Held 1982: 63). When she is worried, Sylvia behaves like a dehydrated flower and hangs “her head as if the stem of it were broken” (199). Mrs. Tilley, her grandmother, reinforces these elective affinities, when she exclaims: “There ain’t a foot o’ ground she don’t know her way over, and the wild creatur’s counts her one o’ themselves. Squer’ls she’ll tame to come an’ feed right out o’ her hands, and all sorts o' birds” (200). In the heterotopia of Mrs. Tilley’s small farm and the surrounding forest, the human and the nonhuman world seem to penetrate each other, remotely anticipating posthuman as well as transhuman syntheses of mind and matter. For these correspondences, Jewett relies “on the tradition of pastoral literature” (Renza 1984: 116; see 116-141). In Leo Marx’s terminology, her story opens up a pastoral middle landscape, which negotiates the garden of Mrs. Tilley’s farm and the machinery of industrialisation (Renza 1984: 118). But the metaphorisation of birds and beasts bidding good-night and a young girl that appears flower-like can also be said to generate an environment in which the human and the nonhuman sphere melt into each other as in Harman’s metaphoric substitution of subjects for objects or Haraway’s attempts to overstep species boundaries. From the story’s very beginning, Jewett’s pastoral is not really a peaceable kingdom, however, but marked by divisive tendencies. The domestic animals DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities 37 8 On the companionship of domestic animals in the story, see also Held 1982: 57 f. and Heller 1990: 185. on the farm, a volatile cow and a cat less peaceable than meets the eye, reflect and convey the liminal ambivalences of anthropocentric subjectand ecocentric object-orientation that mark Jewett’s story from the very start. The cow’s and Sylvia’s return to the farmhouse on the June evening when the story begins is extensively described as a meeting of “companions” ( Jewett 1992: 198) - in hindsight evoking Haraway’s appeal to respect companion species. 8 Like the partly resistant and partly submissive cow, the farm cat is a companion species not without incalculable aggressiveness. The friendly and personable pussy is at the same time a predator of robins (198; see Renza 1984: 51). The bucolic peace of the story’s opening is pervaded by warning signals, among them the aggressiveness of domestic animals, which are not quite as domesticated as they sometimes appear. The fluctuations between close affection among companion species and the otherness produced by utilisation or instinct, which are noticeable in the relationships with and among the story’s domestic animals, also mark human interaction. Sylvia’s harmonious intercourse with the natural world is suddenly interrupted by “a boy’s whistle, determined, and somewhat aggressive” (199). A tall young man with a gun over his shoulder meets her in the forest on her way home to the farm. The stranger gives voice to a scientifically motivated, analytical attitude towards nature. Like Dan, Mrs. Tilley’s son who went to California (see 200), he goes out “gunning” (199). He is an ornithologist, who has “shot and snared”, “stuffed and preserved, dozens and dozens” of birds (201). Although Sylvia initially sees him as an “enemy” (199), she and her grandmother accept the young man as their guest. Once he learns about Sylvia's closeness to nature in general and birds in particular, the ornithologist hopes that she will help him gain access to the “’little white heron’” (201) he is after, a species rare in late nineteenth-century Maine (Held 1982: 60). In keeping with his sober rationalism and commercial mindset, he offers “’ten dollars to anybody who could show it to me’” ( Jewett 1992: 201). Although she has her doubts, Sylvia is impressed by the hunter-ornithologist and remains in liminal indecision between enchantment with the person and rejection of his scientifically camouflaged murderous instincts: Sylvia would have liked him vastly better without his gun; she could not understand why he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much. But as the day waned, Sylvia still watched the young man with loving admiration. She had never seen anybody so DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 38 Jochen Achilles 9 The term is derived from Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston. charming and delightful; the woman’s heart, asleep in the child, was vaguely thrilled by a dream of love. (201) The opposition of Sylvia’s ecocentrist leanings and the young hunter’s anthro‐ pocentric self-assertion is embedded in her emotional conflict with the stranger, who is a male presence in addition to being a representative of materialism and scientific instrumentalisation. Jewett’s crossover of coming of age-tale and nature writing contributes to the liminal complexity of “A White Heron”: “He can make them rich with money, he has promised it, and they are poor now. He is so well worth making happy, and he wants to hear the story she can tell. No, she must keep her silence! What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb? ” (204). Sylvia’s emotional attachment to the ornithologist draws her towards the acknowledgment of his anthropocentric materialism, which runs counter to her own convictions: “In this instant Sylvia balances the desire to earn the ten dollars and to please the attractive stranger against her unspoken fidelity to nature” (Held 1982: 64). The story’s plot of youthful first love could lead to a lasting relationship of Sylvia and the hunter, a relationship which would in turn introduce her to the scientific community and the urban culture the young ornithologist seems to belong to. But such an, in conventional terms successful, initiation would subvert Sylvia’s role as the harbinger of a different, spiritualised and ecocentric, relationship to nature. Sylvia’s final decision to remain in her grandmother’s forest ecotopia 9 is the triumph of her embeddedness in the natural environment, but also spells personal stagnation in a hedged-in micro-community. The story’s somewhat melancholy ending reflects this unresolvable clash of priorities, which generically expresses itself in Jewett’s combination of ecofiction and initiation story. Trying to understand natural phenomena by putting herself in their place, Sylvia follows an object-oriented ontology, as she performs the metaphoric substitution suggested by Harman. By contrast, the young hunter clearly separates the spheres of observation and the observed and accepts the human limitations of cognition. While Sylvia represents an early form of posthuman relinquishment not quite as radical as Hayles’s, Bennett’s, and Haraway’s, the hunter’s attitude is marked by a similar desire to dominate the nonhuman by scientific methods, which will a century and a half later enable the cyberworlds and techno-utopias of transhumanists like Kurzweil and Andreessen. This conflict is negotiated in terms of the dynamism of Sylvia’s initiation process. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities 39 10 On this duality, see also Held 1982: 63 and Heller 1990: 187. 11 The theatricality Harman attributes to metaphorisation allows for histrionic identifi‐ cation, which turns the observer into an element of the object world (see 2018: 82 ff.). The dramatic absoluteness of Emerson’s rapture arguably also comes with a dose of histrionics. “A White Heron”: Sylvia’s threshold experience The second part of the story brings to a head Sylvia's inner conflict between anthropocentric demands and ecocentric desires, her budding infatuation with the young hunter and her love of nature - in Jewett’s words, between “the great wave of human interest which flooded for the first time this dull little life” and “the satisfaction of an existence heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest” (1992: 202). 10 In order to clarify her relationship with both nature and the young man, Sylvia climbs a landmark pine-tree, which has escaped the woodcutting around it (202). The pine tree signifies the indomitable resilience of an archetypal nature which is capable of surviving human exploitation (Brenzo 1978: 39). Sylvia’s perch on top of it allows for a sublimely comprehensive vista of the surrounding world: “truly it was a vast and awesome world. The birds sang louder and louder. At last the sun came up bewilderingly bright. Sylvia could see the white sails of ships out at sea, and the clouds that were purple and rose-colored and yellow at first began to fade away” ( Jewett 1992: 203). To shield Sylvia’s ecocentrism from the hunter’s bullets, sent in the pursuit of scientific enlightenment, Jewett summons the Romantic enthusiasm of an earlier period: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s transcen‐ dentalist glorification of nature, built on Immanuel Kant’s and Edmund Burke’s notions of the sublime (Heller 1990: 188, 191; Smith 1983: 39). Sylvia’s prospect from the tree top is reminiscent of Thoreau’s exposed view from the summit of Mount Katahdin, the highest elevation in Maine: “This was the undone ex‐ tremity of the globe […]. At length I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit” (1993: 112). Sylvia’s enchantment on top of the pine tree also resembles Emerson’s enthusiasm in “Nature” (1836), his most famous essay: “Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all” (1998: 1075). Emerson claims the possibility of cognitive relinquishment to the extent of total identification with his environment. This is not so far away from Harman’s object-oriented ontology and its posthuman trajectory of the transformation of the observer into a quasi-object with the help of metaphoric substitution. 11 Alongside the transient suspension of subjectivity by his depersonalised gaze, Emerson also DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 40 Jochen Achilles 12 On this anthropomorphism, see Brenzo 1978: 39; Heller 1990: 188 f. and Smith 1983: 41. 13 See also Heller 1990: 188 and Held 1982: 64. argues that nature itself is essentially spiritual: “In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature” (1998: 1075). And the “world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (1083). This total absorption of nature as an externalisation of the human mind structurally resembles current transhumanist positions. Emerson’s transcendentalist stance of the spiritualisation of a nature, in which he also wants to immerse himself, thus nods in the direction of both subjectand object-orientation. In keeping with Emerson’s dictum of the emblematic character of the world, the pine tree appears like a “monstrous ladder reaching up, almost to the sky itself ”, “a great main-mast to the voyaging earth” ( Jewett 1992: 203). It anthropomorphically shows amazement and even appears as a paternal provider: “the old pine must have loved his new dependent” (203). 12 While the tree seems to be an affective part of the human world, Sylvia shares Emerson’s self-effacement in his transparent eyeball-passage. She climbs the tree “with her bare feet and fingers, that pinched and held like bird’s claws” (203). The pine tree reacts by its own mimicry of bird behaviour, when its sharp twigs scratch Sylvia in return “like angry talons” (203), suggesting “that both she and the tree are bird-like” (Smith 1983: 41). 13 Sylvia also absorbs the object world she perceives from the tree-top, but she primarily integrates herself into it and becomes part of it. She identifies with the heron entirely, when she feels “as if she too could go flying away among the clouds” ( Jewett 1992: 203). She shares the perceptual cosmos of the heron, a perspective she does not give up even after her return to her grandmother’s farm, when “she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together” (205). Such post-Emersonian and proto-posthuman positioning pervades Jewett’s story and links the evasive heron with the domestic animals on the farm in an ecocentric cosmos ( Smith 1983: 42). Sylvia’s mystical togetherness with the heron and the harmonising perspective it provides become the basis of her protective silence about the heron’s whereabouts, her breach with “the kind of society represented by whistling boys, collecting hunters, and noisy catbirds” (Heller 1990: 190), her final rejection of the ornithologist’s advances by what has been considered “an empowering and intimate silence” (Dolberg 1998: 124) and a form of feminist DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities 41 14 On the significance of Sylvia’s silence, see also Jewett 1992: 205; Held 1982: 60, 65; Heller 1990: 191; Renza 1984: 73-115 and Roman 1992. 15 For the gains and losses of Sylvia’s decision, see also Brenzo 1978: 40 and Held 1982: 60f. resistance to the “rapacious patriarchal world” of the hunter (Renza 1984: 78). 14 Such bonding with nature is tantamount to the loss of the company and love of the young man, whose continued happy whistling and shooting resonates in the forest long after he has left in disappointment. Is a union with nature, prefiguring, as it may, Hayles’s, Bennett’s, and Haraway’s posthumanism, sufficient compensation for the isolation from a selfish, materialist, and cruel world? Jewett seems to doubt adequate compensation for what Sylvia sacrifices: “Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been, - who can tell? Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summer-time, remember! Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country-child! ” ( Jewett 205; see Heller 1990: 184). As already mentioned, the dynamics of Sylvia’s initiation plays out against the background of the epochal transformation of the United States from an agrarian to an industrial society, which is directly attacked in Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw” and Norris’s “A Deal in Wheat”, but only alluded to in the sylvan setting of “A White Heron”. Sylvia’s birthplace is a manufacturing town, the ornithologist is endowed with gun, jack-knife, and money, insignia of this aggressive world. His unfettered self-confidence reflects “the optimism of the nineteenth-century despoilers of nature who deforested the woods” where Jewett grew up and “introduces into a subsistence economy the instrumentality of money” (Held 1982: 59, 60). By Sylvia’s final silence, the story endorses “childhood imagination over scientific or utilitarian modes of knowing nature, here associated with adulthood and the ‘acquisitive’ discursive habits of a progressivist republican culture” (Renza 1984: 53). Sylvia’s “choice for a poor but self-subsistent rural economy; for a preindustrial, pretechnological way of life” seems to win out against the hunter as a “harbinger of federalist culture” (53, 54). These nineteenth-century American conflicts can be considered forerunners of contemporary debates of ecoand anthropocentrism, postand transhumanism. Telescoping into each other, on the one hand, the larger ecological dynamics of an agrarian American society developing into a capitalist and industrial one and, on the other, Sylvia’s threshold experience in the forest showcases the sacrifices and deficits resistance to this dynamics entails. 15 Altruistic love of nature will only survive in minuscule ecotopias like “the hermitage” ( Jewett 1992: 200) of Mrs. Tilley’s tiny farm, a notion revived in the twenty-first century by Plumwood’s and Springer’s alternative shadow communities. In DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 42 Jochen Achilles “a continuous process of self-indeterminacy, referential and figurative” (Renza 1984: 72; original emphasis), the story’s ending persists in liminal oscillations on the threshold between immaturity and disillusionment, empathy and emotional numbness. Environmental dynamics and personal decisions in theory and narrative In Jewett’s story, the conflict between ecoand anthropocentrism is embedded in both the processuality and spatial confines of Sylvia’s introduction into alternative life choices. “A White Heron” follows the pattern of initiation out‐ lined by Turner: “three phases: separation, margin (or limen), and aggregation” (1967: 94). The three June days of the story’s duration mark the three phases Turner mentions. The first day ends the unquestioned harmony with nature Sylvia has experienced on her grandmother’s farm ( Jewett 1992: 197-201). The arrival of the young ornithologist confronts the ecocentric normative horizon of Sylvia’s life with his enlightened anthropocentrism. The second day (201 f.) is filled with the togetherness of Sylvia and the hunter in the forest and the liminal negotiation of the value systems they represent - the hunter’s intellectual superiority and unfeeling disruption of forest life, Sylvia’s almost blinded infatuation with him and her deep-seated sympathy for the integrity of the natural environment. On the final day (202-205), Sylvia seeks and finds clarification of her position by her threshold experience on top of the pine tree, where a sublime vista confirms her initial ecocentrism. The re-aggregation that follows leads to Sylvia’s stay on the farm and the ornithologist’s departure. The initial value system is re-established but the self-denial it entails and its limitation to the ecotopia of the grandmother’s small farm have become apparent. The attitudes towards nature which the story rehearses signal, on the side of the hunter, a questionable maturity obsessed with a quest for classification and a logic of exploitation and, on Sylvia's side, a self-effacing acknowledgment of the natural world. Sylvia’s proto-posthuman relinquishment is tied to her rejection of adult love relationships and thereby to regression and the persistence of child‐ hood. That love of nature and love of humans seem to become mutually exclusive remains disquieting. The merging of nature and spirit, subject and object is relegated to a child's world that will presumably be outgrown. Without trying to resolve these cognitive, psychological, and ecological conflicts, “A White Heron” raises doubts as to whether the development of a materialistically goal-oriented world and potentially equally instrumentalised gender relationships deserves DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 Negotiations of Postand Transhuman Liminalities 43 to be named progress and whether young hunters of any description should not rather retreat into a sylvan world of holistic allure. These uncertainties result from acting out epochal conflicts on the plane of highly idiosyncratic individual interaction. While the theories discussed do not tie their hypotheses to the depiction of individual fate, Jewett’s tale demonstrates the existential complexity theoretical assumptions adopt, when they become part of the core area of private life and personal decision. While the narrative combination of personal development and a horizon of abstract polarities delimits the conceptual range of fiction, it heightens its affective impact. In a long-range perspective, both “A White Heron” and contemporary postand transhuman theoretical conceptions appear as stages in an ongoing debate of the impact of human endeavour on the environment. The basic awareness of a necessary reorientation in the relations of the human and the nonhuman persists as well as the undecidability of the options that offer themselves. Whether the dazzlement by the digital revolution justifies the techno-optimism of transhuman positions or necessitates total ahuman surrender remains as open as the authorial comment at the end of “A White Heron”, which refrains from trying to balance what nature and civilisation have to offer, respectively. The story sets against each other the prospect of personal happiness and the preservation of nature, priorities which remain irreconcilable in the character constellation of the text. Jewett’s story therefore restricts itself to an appeal to “woodlands and summer-time” to care for, and communicate with, an individual full of empathy, willing to relinquish herself to them. The ending of Jewett’s story remains liminally undecided about either a return to nature or unfettered technological advancement. Matter may be vibrant, but opinions about what its vibrations precisely signify are not less divided today as in Jewett’s day. While the basic awareness of necessary reorientation in the relations of the human and the nonhuman continues, the proliferation of options in the visions of the present was unthinkable a century ago. This multiplicity of aspects is arguably an effect of human rather than nonhuman developments - not least of the very scientific and technological progress, which is being debated in both fiction and theory. Works Cited Achilles, Jochen. 2005. “The Subject-Object Paradigm: Conflict and Convergence in Theories of Landscape, Consciousness, and Technoscape since Emerson and Thoreau”. In: Benesch, Klaus/ Schmidt, Kerstin, eds. Space in America: Theory, History, Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 53-90. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 44 Jochen Achilles Achilles Jochen. 2007. “Dismantling the Promised Land: Ironies of Environmental Iden‐ tity Constitution in Mark Twain’s Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn (1880) and Hamlin Garland’s Under the Lion’s Paw (1888)”. In: Honegger, Thomas/ Orth, Eva-Maria/ Schwabe, Sandra, eds. Irony Revisited: Spurensuche in der englischsprachigen Literatur. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 315-332. 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New York: PAJ Publications Turner, Victor. 2011. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction. Twain, Mark. 1997. “Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn”. 1880. In: Mark Twain. A Tramp Abroad. Bruce, Robert Gray/ Hill, Hamlin, eds. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 15-18. Vinge, Vernor. 2013. “Technological Singularity”. 1993. In: More, Max/ Vita-More, Nata‐ sha, eds. 365-375. Welsch, Wolfgang. 2022. “Reason and Transition: On the Concept of Transversal Reason”. https: / / ecommons.cornell.edu/ bitstream/ handle/ 1813/ 54/ Welsch_Reason_and_Trans ition.htm? sequence=1&; isAllowed=y DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0002 48 Jochen Achilles The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited James Dowthwaite Introduction As a philosophical disposition, posthumanism has led to a broad expansion of critical awareness of the relationality of the human and human perspectives. In literary studies, for example, it calls attention to the ways that consciousness is not solipsistic, bounded self-reflection, but is constituted in relation to environment, to atmosphere, to other minds, known or imputed, and to objects. Objects, in particular, have been promoted to crucial status by posthumanism. And yet this broad expansion does come up against limits, particularly in literary studies. Posthuman literary accounts tend to elide an important element in the ontology of objects in literary works: the human imagination. In how far can we really call objects in novels, poems, playscripts (even props in performances, constituted as they are within an aesthetic performance) ‘nonhuman’? For Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, the aim of posthumanism hardly seems far from the central concerns of humanism: “to read in a posthuman way is to read against one’s self, against one’s own deep-seated self-understanding as a member or even representative of a certain ‘species’” (2008: 95). This oppositional reading, however, still has the human being at the centre, even if the self-awareness might lead to a better appreciation of where human influence - if we can still speak of such a thing in a posthuman tradition - leaves off and objects begin their collaborative work in the interpretative world. Pieter Vermeulen lauds what he calls the shift from “human emotion to posthuman affect” (2014: 121). While this may be useful in accounting for our relationality regarding nonhuman objects, it is too staid a stance to account for lyric poetry, for example, particularly in modern traditions, where emotion, as a humanised concept, is at the centre. Is emotion, for example, not a better word for Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty Like the Night” (1814), William Butler Yeats’s “The Moods” (1899), or, to give a prose example, that which the titular character represses in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925)? Emotion, I suggest, better DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 captures the human aspect, because of its relative freedom from theories, material and metaphysical. And this sense of humanisation is central to much writing throughout literary history, including that which centres around objects. The limits of affect, for example, can be seen in poems such as John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), a work which is ostensibly about an object, but in which, as the poem advances towards its dramatic end, the urn appears to express itself: O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede --------Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; ---------Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! ---------When old age shall this generation waste, --------------- Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, ---------“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all --------------- Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”. (2009a: 178, 41-50) This essay argues that Keats’s poem offers a complicated case for posthuman conceptions of the nonhuman, and that the object is contingent on the human imagination conceiving it. Such an imaginative object cannot be so readily conceived as nonhuman. Keats’s famous dictum, that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is well known, and remains controversial. That this is imagined to have been spoken by an inanimate object is striking, and the poem in fact hinges on what it is that this object says. This object is, of course, a particular kind of object, an artwork, which for Keats gives it a particular status, and therefore also a particular authority in commenting on matters of truth and beauty. The whole poem can be seen as an exploration of the kind of communication that an artwork can give: in the case of the urn, it speaks silently, over millennia - communication that is markedly different from our own, because if it is to speak, it is only by our imputation. And yet Keats’s urn is especially complex in that it is not only an artistic object, but is the subject of poetic imagination: The urn is fictitious, and is used throughout the poem to investigate the nature of art and what it is that art might say to us, were it able to speak. On the surface, we would appear to have a strong case of a human-nonhuman interaction here. In a recent special issue of Textual Practice, Laura Colombino and Peter Childs provide a concise and enlightening account of how the ‘nonhuman’ has become a central concern of literary studies. They assess the situation thus: DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 50 James Dowthwaite Moving away from the Western cultural prioritisation of the human(ist) subject, such a turn combats anthropocentrism by considering the human as an object among other objects (as in object-oriented philosophy and the speculative realism of Meillassoux and Brassier), or as one body among other bodies (in new materialism), or as one form of matter among the diversity of material in the universe (Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’), or one form of agency within a myriad of energies and organic developments (as elaborated in Bookchin’s social ecology). (2022: 356) Colombino’s and Childs’s account is rich with detail from contemporary lit‐ erature, reflecting the contributions to the issue, and they demonstrate the centrality of the philosophical task of shifting away from anthropocentric models of literary thinking. Within this, they highlight the importance of con‐ sciousness, writing that “while consciousness remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of science, despite attempts to explain it through computer models or as an epiphenomenon of brain activity, its extension to nonhuman entities is increasingly at the core of literary creativity” (359 f.). The “imaginative leap”, as they usefully term it, of this conceptual attempt to imagine the consciousness of the nonhuman is of crucial importance for human-nonhuman interaction. They argue that it inculcates a “proximity and empathy” which “can be perceived as having an empowering, transformative potential, which may liberate us from enduring cultural constraints and binary paradigms of domination” (360). But the watchword remains “may”. Too often we act as if these are foregone critical conclusions. The focus on contemporary literature is sensible, of course, as the purpose of their special issue is to investigate current concerns and future directions, but criticism need not obey the pressured, narrow timeline of current events for its frameworks and symbols. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is one of the most famous literary examples of human-nonhuman interaction, and it is striking that the consciousness imparted to the nonhuman is the central event on which the poem hinges. Keats’s urn complicates the idea of the object. Joseph Tabbi, in his Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism (2024) offers a milder vision of posthu‐ manism than Herbrechter and Callus, and than Vermeulen, arguing that “it is possible to view the posthuman as signalling not so much a break with our human nature (if that could ever have been settled) as a carrying forward and questioning of humanism into the current era” (2024: 2). Tabbi clarifies that posthumanism is “a reconstruction and medial relocation of the human mind itself, in relation to other minds and to objects that are newly approached and identified through distributed networks and nonhuman, medial affordances” (60). But the issue is what one does with literary objects, that is, objects which are imagined or fictional, constituted not by their material existence, but by DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 51 1 Two counter examples to this tendency might be Joseph Campana’s and Scott Mai‐ sano’s Renaissance Posthumanism (2016) and Francesca Spiegel’s and Giulia Maria Chesi’s-Classical Literature and Posthumanism-(2021). These works, however, insist on the relevance of posthumanist theory for situating classical works in relation to our thought today - a valuable enterprise in its own right, of course - more than they derive posthuman sensibilities from the works themselves. their subsistence within the aesthetic of the artwork. In all this, one might well ask whether the objects of literary works, for example, can be considered with the same materialist ontology as nonhuman objects in the world. The case is complicated even further by poems like Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, in which the object is explicitly posited as a work of the imagination. The question that I pose at the end is, then, in how far posthuman ontologies of objecthood are applicable to literary works. Posthuman literary studies is in rude health, and my aim is not to challenge its numerous contributions to broad thematic questions. Sanna Karkulehto et al. give a strong demonstration of posthumanism’s contribution to literature: “narratives, cultures, and their constituents” are, they claim, “instruments of mind”, “which can help us humans to construct more nuanced and ethical relationships not only with each other but also with nonhumans” (2020: 9). Posthumanism, on this view, “can offer ways to view different nonhuman material entities escape and defy our human desire for narrative logics and descriptions” (16). The problem is that the essays collected in their edited collection, though they demonstrate this skill consummately, are really only concerned with contemporary works of fiction, in which human-nonhuman relationships are expressly thematised. The same can be said of a recent special issue of English Studies, edited by Başak Ağın and Z. Gizem Yılmaz on ‘Posthumanism and English Studies’ (2025). The essays therein are sensitive and expansive, generous accounts of what nonhuman subjectivities may tell us, but the discussion is limited to those areas where these aspects are expressly thematised: fantasy, science fiction, contemporary fiction in the wake of the apparent posthuman ‘turn’. The rest of the wide breadth of English literature is left largely untouched. 1 In their introduction, Ağın and Yılmaz write that posthumanism is not a limitation of the human being but instead “the generative assemblages of the more-than-human forces that make up and have always made up what we considered to be human” (2025: 648 f.). A fine aim, one may conclude, but does it not depend on a limited - and one might even say arbitrarily limited - conception of where the limits of the human are in art if we can speak of the more-than-human? Such a conception, I contend, will not hold in the case DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 52 James Dowthwaite of Keats’s urn, in which the forces that make it up remain human, even when it itself speaks. Keats’s urn: Post-Humanist criticism The speaking of the urn has proven a controversial artistic decision on Keats’s part. T. S. Eliot, for one, was not convinced. In his 1929 essay “Dante” he laid down an interpretative challenge to Keats: “On re-reading the whole Ode, this line strikes me as a serious blemish on a beautiful poem, and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue” (59). Eliot, though seemingly baffled, does hint at a general strategy of handling the contention at the end of the poem: that Keats’s meanings of “truth” and “beauty” are idiosyncratic, or perhaps metonymic. Perhaps we might translate them into ‘reality’ and ‘perception’, or ‘intellect’ and ‘emotion’. Translated into more phenomenological terms - poetry, translated, then into phenomenology - might Keats be saying that mind and body are one? Eliot’s interpretation was challenged by the New Critic Cleanth Brooks. Brooks pointed out that Eliot makes the mistake of assuming that it is Keats speaking, rather than a persona, and that the persona who speaks is not a person, but an inanimate object which, the poem tells us from its outset, is by definition silent. The poem thus hinges on a paradox, which is that a necessarily silent object speaks, and we lose the meaning of the poem if we abstract away from this concrete dramatic situation: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ has precisely the same status, and the same justification as Shakespeare's ‘Ripeness is all’. It is a speech ‘in character’ and supported by a dramatic context” (1947: 165). Although I am in broad sympathy with Brooks’s reading, the contention of this essay is that he, too, makes a category error. Brooks is correct that the speaking persona, a nonhuman, is all-important, and that the speaking of the urn is the most significant aspect of this poem. He is also correct that the silence of the urn in the rest of the poem is to be measured against its speaking at the end, and that the impossible act of the object raising its voice should motivate all subsequent interpretations. But there are two aspects of his argument that need correction, pedantic though it may seem. The first is the assumption that the urn offers a singular proposition: that truth and beauty are one and the same. This is, in fact, only the first of three propositions. The others are that this is “all [we] know on earth”, and that this is “all [we] need to know”. In many ways, these claims are more controversial even than the identity of truth and beauty. The second - and most important for what follows - assumption is the idea that the urn speaks. This is not something that is proven in the poem; instead, what DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 53 2 See also 63-86 for a general outline of Latour’s argument for the agency of objects. we have is an imputed speech, an imagined act of dialogue on the part of an inanimate object. What Brooks leaves out of his otherwise brilliant analysis is that this is not a silent urn that speaks but rather a human being who imagines a silent urn speaking. The object is transformed into an articulate being by an act of human imagination, and it is this imagination that needs to be restored not only to Keats’s poem but, I will reflect at the end, to our conception of objects in literary works. My argument is that Keats’s urn is a very particular kind of object: an imagined, and therefore human, object. I make this claim at a time after which the advent of new materialism has led to a grand rethinking of the ontological status of objects. In line with posthumanism and transhumanism, critics are encouraged no longer to conceive of objects as adjuncts, extensions or symbols of an anthropocentric world. At the very least since Bruno Latour insisted that objects are the co-creators, “literally - not metaphorically”, as he claims, building society, the longstanding dualisms of subject-object, human-nonhuman have been severely shaken (1993: 54). Latour puts this most strongly in Reassembling the Social, stressing that this role as co-creator of the social world means that objects have agency as actants, or things that have an effect, and produce affect. They constitute the world no less than we do, so goes the argument, and thus have agency, ‘take action’ in a world of theory that repudiates ideas of freedom (2005: 72). 2 That is, it challenges the existentialist concept of freedom being the constitutive condition of humanity; instead, we are granted only the sense that, as bodies in the world, we have the agency of influencing other bodies, to which we are intimately, indelibly bound. Latour’s point can be well taken but there is a slight complication with Keats’s urn. On the surface, the poem might serviceably be used to demonstrate Latour’s theory: Is not the speaker also spoken to, in a manner of speaking, by the urn? Does it not have an effect on him or her? This could conceivably be the object’s agency. A reconsideration of the poem from a Latourian perspective could very much help us to move away from the anthropomorphic conception of objects as adjuncts, extensions, and symbols. But therein lies the issue: Are we not running the risk of conceiving of adjuncts, extensions, and symbols as objects? Is the urn really an object in the sense that Latour means? The nonhuman approach to the traditional purview of the humanities has, of course, different directions, but what these all share is a decentring of anthropomorphic assumptions. Braidotti’s vision of posthumanism is based on an expansion of the human being beyond what she sees as the limits of traditional humanism, with its Euroand Anthropo-centrism. She embeds the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 54 James Dowthwaite 3 Haraway’s “speculative fabulations” might offer some resonance with Keats’s approach, but even there her focus is more on the model of the real than on the symbolic forms of the imagination. human being in a broader world, relational to other species, other objects, other forces, more porous and open to the world (2010: 49). Donna Haraway, in works such as the Companion Species Manifesto (2003) or Staying with the Trouble (2016), also offers a critical vision which embeds human beings in a broader world, populated by other “critters”, as she calls them. 3 Following Braidotti and Haraway, one might be tempted to reconsider the agency of the urn as a companion species of a kind, with agency and modes of expression, simply different to our own. All of this might be evident in Keats’s approach but there is a fundamental issue, which is that the human being is at the centre of his poem. Keats’s poem is a work of the imagination - the human imagination - and the object with which it deals is immensely complicated by its being an imagined object. So complicated is Keats’s urn, that it is difficult to apply any theoretical model of human-nonhuman relations to it without committing the critical error against which Brooks warned. What I mean is this: Keats’s urn is not a nonhuman object in the sense that posthumanism usually conceives one, and so poses an issue for a wholesale adaptation of posthuman objecthood for literary studies. Even allowing for the simulating power of fictionality, which would make us see the urn as a fictional (or fictionalised) version of a real - or possible - object, we would be in critical error. The urn is characterised by its impossibility; it performs a series of aesthetic tasks which it can only perform by virtue of being an imagined object. Keats relies entirely on the ways in which the object breaks the boundaries of what is physically possible, in ways I will demonstrate below, meaning that imputing a model of the nonhuman derived from posthumanist entanglements is not only difficult, but undesirable. To do so would be to destroy the aesthetic imagined object as it “really is”, to quote Matthew Arnold (1865: 9) and Walter Pater (2010: 4). The relation in the poem is between the speaker and the imagined object, as imagined - not simulated real - object. In other words, what Keats creates in the poem is a humanised object. It is not human, that is why the urn cannot speak and why its imputed speech at the end remains only imputed, but it is also not nonhuman in the sense that contemporary theory conceives of objects; it has no agency beyond what the speaker imputes to it. It remains arbitrary, created, and therefore aesthetic, and therefore “beautiful” as the speaker of the poem would understand it. And so what of the relation between theoretical turns of the past half century and Keats’s work? Like many Romantic writers, Keats is at the centre of debates DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 55 4 For an account relating Keats to contemporaneous notions of disinterestedness, see Khalip (2006). around materialism, particularly regarding the affective elements of his “life of sensations” (Keats 2009b: 36). Forest Pyle argues that Keats’s work displays a materialism of its own, different from the assumptions of the historical materialist school which underwrote many of the critical assumptions of the late twentieth century (1994: 58). This materialism implies that the physicality of the objects in his poems, such as the urn, should be at the forefront of the critical imaginary, and less their symbolic or conceptual value. Gillian Beer argues that in “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “the objects worshipped are outside the poet’s self, each inhabiting a world impervious to his psyche”. The urn, she argues, inhabits “a world of inanimate artistic form” (1969: 744). We might see this as an example of an idealistic ascesis but applied to the material world. 4 Shahidha Bari has gone a little further, arguing that Keats’s “Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts” is a life imagined “in which sensation is not mindless or purely epicurean but which constitutes, for him, a different, non-‘consequitive’ kind of thinking” (2012: xix). Bari’s sensitive and moving account of the importance of “touch” as the embodiment of relationships, between Keats and others, between readers and the poetry, between art and philosophy, allows us to see a more expansive vision of this “life of sensations” as pertinent to materialism as a philosophical disposition. Her commitment to reading Keats through poststructuralist orthodoxy, however, does alienate him from poetry and repositions his work as proto-theory. There have been fruitful and elegant posthumanist readings of Keats’s work, which have yielded new insights that situate him well in relation to contempo‐ rary theoretical concerns. Ron Broglio has provided a nuanced and detailed account of the ways in which Romanticism chimes with posthumanist critical ideas, one which is particularly convincing for its assimilation of historical detail, readings of the work, and contemporary theory. Broglio points out that criticism has been reluctant to part with Romantic ideals of personhood, and that it has often failed to see the work critically apart from Romantic self-definitions. By contrast, he writes “a posthumanist Romanticism indicts the poetic Romantic construction of interiority” (2016: 37). Broglio’s account is an important reminder of critical pitfalls in general, and with regard to Romanticism specifically. A dyed-in-the-wool posthuman vision of Keats’s work in particular is found in Anna Anselmo’s “Posthuman Keats: Poetry as Assemblage” (2020). Anselmo argues that Keats’s work is posthuman in the way that Frankenstein’s monster is “other-than-human”: “so is Keats’s DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 56 James Dowthwaite poetry other-than-poetical, managing the impossible balance between intense lyricism and the unpoetical banal” (53). Anselmo’s readings of Keats are careful and skilful, and function, as she writes, on the “micro-poetic” level, but the overall image of Keats’s “cyborg poetry” is more in service of Haraway’s critical project than it is of Keats’s work in the end (2020: 56). In the following, respectfully challenging Broglio and Anselmo, I will rely on the Romantic ideal of personhood and interiority, not because I believe that such terms are always correct, but because I believe they best explain the human-object relation in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Before turning to the poem, however, I will briefly consider Keats’s reflections on the imagination in his letters. Keats’s imagination The imagination is a contested space for Keats, and is not something which we can clearly define and delineate. Charles W. Mahoney has written of Keats’s imagination that it is a particular site of the famously contested notions of “truth and beauty”: “while oftentimes responsive to that which exists in this world, the essential beauty (or truth) that the imagination creates just as often appears to be the product of a dream, of an abandonment of the real for the ideal” (2017: 168). At times the imagination seems a creative power, actively forming a sense of world; at others, it seems a receptive faculty, created by the world. It is unreasonable to expect philosophical fixity from someone as young as Keats, let alone one who has committed themselves, now famously, to “a life of sensations instead of a life of thoughts” (2009b: 36). At the same time, the conviction of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” would suggest a clearly delineated belief. If we turn to his letters, we find much speculation on the imagination, but little clarity regarding its exact nature. That it is related to beauty and truth, and that it apprehends (or creates) objects and events is clear, but not how, nor how it is reconciled with a broader philosophy of life. At times, Keats seems to have a solid sense of what the imagination is and does. An important reference to the imagination, and particularly significant because of its relation to art, can be seen in a letter he wrote to his brother George, and his sister-in-law Georgiana, on 31 December 1818. He recounts viewing a book of prints of Renaissance Italian art at the house of his friend, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. Keats writes of his feelings on viewing the reproductions of the artworks, that “on my word I have thought so little that I have not one opinion upon anything except in matters of taste—I never can feel certain of any truth but from a clear perception of its Beauty” (2009b: 175). The latter point is, of course, echoed at the end of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 57 though it is not Keats who delivers this statement in that case. It is interesting that it occurs in relation to “matters of taste”, as this narrows the sphere of its application. In this case, Keats refers to his uncertainty regarding matters of truth with regard to the appreciation of artworks, knowing only that he feels beauty for them. This is broadened in the later poem, but this instance should serve to remind us that Keats’s thought on the matter is prompted by questions of aesthetic judgement, rather than metaphysical speculation. He then relates the artworks to the power of his mind: finding them, “grotesque to a curious pitch—yet still making up a fine whole—even finer to me than more accomplish’d works—as there was left so much room for Imagination” (2009b: 175). How much room can be left for imagination is one of the key artistic questions that he would come to address in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, with his answer being a radical assertion of the constitutive power of the imagination itself in the creation, not just the interpretation, of objects. Keats had written to Hayden just over a week earlier (22 nd December 1818), praising the abstract: “I admire Human Nature but I do not like-Men” (163), he informed him. The figure of the Greek vase stayed with Keats, but not as a specific object so much as an occasion for imagination and abstraction. In another letter to his brother and his sister-in-law, written 19 March 1819, he again thinks of the figure of a vase, this time in a state of disinterestedness: “neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a Greek vase—a Man and two women whom no one but myself could distinguish in their disguisement” (212).-What is particularly interesting about this letter is that these statements occur as part of a wider, and ambivalent, discussion of human nature and the human relation to the world. Keats finds himself alienated from the continual human desire for newness and action, writing that “there is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify—so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism” (213). For him, “the pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish”. And yet, in the same letter, he writes of how he pursues “the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of ” (214) in his writing practice. This ambivalence about the “human animal”, its power of imagination, its overreliance on a philosophy of action, its difficulties with truth and beauty, its desire for freedom, desire for happiness, its conflict with the limitation of its circumstances leads him to conclude that: The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature, and no further. For instance suppose a rose to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful morning, it enjoys itself, but then comes a cold wind, a hot sun—it cannot escape it, it DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 58 James Dowthwaite 5 The famous translation of Nietzsche’s Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878). See Nietzsche 1996 for the reference, and a scholarly version of the book. cannot destroy its annoyances—they are as native to the world as itself: no more can man be happy in spite, the worldly elements will prey upon his nature. (232) The references to the green world are important here, as they provide Keats with a broader context, one which the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” tends to aestheticise and subsume within the humanmade qualities of the artwork. But what is most important is that the animal, the nonhuman, world is understood in its symbolic relation to human beings. Even if Keats’s world is “human, all too human”, as Nietzsche’s lament has it, this is the source of its power, and the green world is abstracted into a set of circumstances, its facets becoming like the symbols which move past the poet on the face of a vase. 5 And it is abstracted in turn to what such a vase - or, in its specific funereal condition, an urn - might communicate. Here we must return to the ode. It is worth remembering that Keats opens the poem by emphasising silence. The urn is addressed as the “still unravish'd bride of quietness”, as the “foster-child of silence and slow time” (2009a: 177, ll. 1-2). This silence does not mean that the urn cannot communicate. Far from it, Keats emphasises that the “Sylvan historian” expresses its “flowery tale more sweetly” (177, ll. 3-4), that is, with a finer beauty, than even poetic language. The “leaf-fring’d legend” (177, l. 5) that “haunts” the urn should be understood as its decorative function, its aesthetic identity which, as an artwork, is the only identity it can formally display. Its silence is emphasised further by the rhetorical questions the speaker uses to round off the stanza. As J. Philipp Eggers has put it, “the urn does not transmit its legend to the poet, who, a human historian, must have answers to questions of time, place, and individuality. Its message remains sylvan, pastoral; its only answer to his questions is that no answer is necessary” (1971: 944). That is to say, the only answer it provides is the one imagined by the poet at the end, an act of realisation which is teased out of the silent communication of the urn. So how does the urn communicate? The answer is: aesthetically. It commu‐ nicates by the means by which any aesthetic object should, namely by being all of its formal dimensions. The “leaf fring’d legend” is all of the communication; the figures and forms that the urn has on it are a mode of expressing itself. In many ways, the very form of the poem itself, with Keats’s idiosyncratic stanza form, serves to cultivate a sense of the aesthetic object: “the combination of Shakespearian quatrain with Petrarchan sestet in the ten-line ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ stanza has a balance and assured poise which makes for Keats’s highly characteristic tableau-like effect” (Everest 2021: 11). We might think of DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 59 Thomas McFarland’s elegant judgement on Keats’s poetic achievement: “form, that is, the setting of imagination and reality into dialectic opposition and progression, intertwined itself with a focus to transmute ardour, symbolized by Hellas, into a great structure of poetry” (2000: 194). McFarland insists that “the urn, moreover, in its function as ’sylvan historian’ is specifically recording the human perimeters of the world of Hellas; is telling a ‘tale’ of human engagements” (195). To this I would simply add that the urn is not telling so much as being given the imaginative quality of telling by the poet - its speech is metaphorical, even more human. There is a conceit at work here. The urn which expresses itself better than poetic language exists only in the form of poetic language itself. This is not, à la deconstruction, an undoing of the point, but rather a masking of it - the mask being McFarland’s central metaphor for Keats’s poetic practice. The nature of aesthetic communication is what opens the second stanza. The speaker asserts that ”Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” (Keats 2009a: 177, l. 11). This is prompted, we are to infer, by images of youths with pipes on the surface of the urn itself. These play “Not to the sensual ear” but instead “Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone” (177, ll. 13-14). Quite what Keats means by the “spirit” is unclear, but the vagueness is perhaps necessary. In his letters Keats writes often of the “soul”, understood as a metaphysical portion of us, and something accessible to the imagination. It is this imagined quality - whether this is to be understood in fictional, i.e. literary, or theological terms - that characterises the particular being of the urn. In other words, what matters is what it is about the imagined object that communicates, and this can be found in the figures that it depicts. While the second stanza continues the theme of silent communication from the first, it also introduces another quality of the urn: deathlessness. The piper is captured always on the point of playing his music, meaning that he becomes an aesthetic ideal: he is always inseparable from his song. The speaker describes not only the musicians playing silent music, all the more powerful because it is imagined, but also a pair of lovers who are nearly in a state of embrace. Here Keats marks two aspects of the visual artwork - or, in this case, the imagined visual artwork - that distinguishes it from the world of human action. First, the object is motionless: The figures depicted on it are static, and this means that the two lovers are held forever almost on the point of kissing, but never actually consummate their passion. Compensation for this, however, is the second aspect of the artwork that distinguishes it from action, that distinguishes the figures of the lovers from lovers in life - say, for example, Keats’s ill-fortuned love with Fanny Brawne: though they will never kiss, they will also never separate. The artwork, though it tantalises them by holding them DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 60 James Dowthwaite always on the point of kissing, at the very least will always keep them together - and always keep them beautiful. In this, the pathos and the beauty are one. These themes are continued in the third and fourth stanzas, both of which serve to enrich the description of the urn’s figures and to emphasise the apparent ontological differences between the speaker and the aesthetic object of his meditation. The “happy boughs” (177, l. 21) - depictions of trees and foliage - will never be parted from the spring, existing in a state of idealisation denied those who will have to live through winter; equally, the “happy melodist” will always be creating “new” music; its newness deriving its inseparability from the idealised arcadia of its context. That same note of pathos is there in the “happy, happy love” that the urn captures, that “all breathing human passion far above” which manifests itself as a fever in those mortals which view it with hearts “high-sorrowful” (177, ll. 25-29). This ambivalence is an important feature of the speaker’s relationship with the object. The fourth stanza is a series of unanswerable questions. When he or she asks who the figures are who come to “the sacrifice”, what it is that drives the pastoral priest - a kind of holy shepherd - to lead his “heifer” with her “silken flanks with garlands drest” (177, ll. 33-34), or what the identity of the town - emptied for the sacrifice away at the distant, unseen, temple - Keats is really using the speaker to build an imaginative image. These questions cannot be answered on one level, because the artwork itself reveals nothing of its progeny, only of its forms, but also on another level, namely that for the reader of the poem - and probably for its author - the urn is a wholly imaginary object. It has its aesthetic existence only in the questions that the speaker asks of it. This is why the streets of the town “for evermore / Will silent be” (177, ll. 38-39): the contours of the urn do not refer to anything that antiquarianism can reveal; they exist only in the lines and images of the poem, itself an extension of the imagination of the speaker. And so the poem hinges on the outline of, and meditation on, an aesthetic object that has its existence only in the expression of the speaker; the rhetorical questions are not only poetic devices of conceptualisation, but are in fact ontologically constitutive of a unique kind of object, one which is inseparable from the human imagination that sustains it. A shift of perspective towards that of the object, which would be to say, an orientation away from the anthropocentric conception of the human being, such as Latour, Haraway, or Braidotti might rightly promote, becomes difficult here. And yet it is precisely this which Keats affects in the final, haunting stanza. The stanza is, indeed, unsettling, and it is the haunting sense of incongruity which critics such as Eliot have mistaken for confusion on Keats’s part. The “pseudo-statement” which Eliot claims concludes the poem might actually be well-named, but not for the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 61 reasons that he thinks. The statement is really an adaptation of a mask. One must, as Brooks suggests, bear in mind who is speaking, and what the absurdity of the “urn’s” communication might unsettle in us. Keats turns again to the urn as a whole, addressing that “Attic shape! ”, that “Fair attitude! with brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought” (178, ll. 41-42). Michael O’Neill has written of the unsettling aspect of the final stanza that its power lies in the very transformation of a form of life - the ancient Mediterranean, at least as imagined in modernity - into art: “the turning of the Mediterranean to ‘marble’ represents the solidifying of the imagination's other world into the chilling ‘attitude’ of the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’s’ last stanza” (2011: 282). In this sense, there is a more general character to Keats’s treatment in the poem, one that applies to all artwork which deals with a concrete place, even if its concretion is the crystallisation of an ideal. This does not apply specifically to imagined objects, though the process of apprehending them might be the same. Either way, the power of the artwork to disrupt quotidian and commonplace, or even complex and abstract, ways of conceiving the world is part of its grand appeal for Keats. This is why he has the speaker refer again to the urn as “Thou silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity” (178, ll. 44-45). The “Cold Pastoral”(177, l. 45) is a thing sublime, speaking the language of sensations and of the soul, a disturbance of rationality. All of this could be assimilated within posthuman and neo-materialist orthodoxies: the object challenges the rational structures through which we believe we have ordered, patterned, understood, and therefore controlled the universe. And there are numerous examples which populate the works of the abovementioned that demonstrate this, but to reach this judgement would be to forget Brooks’s warning and to compound Eliot’s error. It would also be to ignore the wrought complexity of the poem’s final lines, which are worth quoting in full: When old age shall this generation waste, --------------- Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, ---------"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all --------------- Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (178, ll. 46-50) Most critical attention has focussed on the assertion of the penultimate line, not only because of its still provocative aestheticist challenge to critical orthodoxy, but also because of its obvious importance to the author of the poem himself. As Nicholas Roe puts it, “the chiasmus with which the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ concludes was an appropriately enigmatic, introverted figure for the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 62 James Dowthwaite nineteenth-century image of Keats” (1998: 12 f.). In an extended treatment of the contention as a proposition for aesthetics, Herbert F. Tucker has demonstrated the lines’ importance for the nineteenth century as a whole: that sibylline pronouncement at the end of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has meant various things to various readers, and indeed the prediction of such variance not only is one of the messages the words harbor but also forms a major clause within the brief that nineteenth-century poetics presented about the utility of aesthetic variability as such. (2022: 101) But those lines, to follow Brooks, should be seen in the context of what surrounds them, and though Keats isolated the contention in other places in his letters, here they are in a very particular dramatic situation: What matters is that an urn, the silence of which has been stressed throughout the poem, speaks them. However, and here my account differs from Brooks’, it is worth remembering that this is imputed speech: though it is subtle, the urn’s speech is really subsumed within the poetic discourse of the speaker - that “thou say’st” is not a reporting of direct speech but instead a translation of its silent aesthetic contours into conditional, imagined lines. It is what an urn - an artwork - would say were it to be able to speak, and this hypothetical point is sustained by the fact that the urn itself is an object of the human imagination, of a fictional materiality, not a physical one. As I have already said above, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is, furthermore, only one of a number of contentions in this passage, and one of three that the urn itself is claimed to make. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is the first contention; the second is that “this is all ye know on earth”; the third is that this “is all ye need to know”. The identity of beauty and truth is a controversial point in and of itself, but the “urn” radicalises this contention further by claiming that it is all that human beings are capable of knowing. This is an unsettling point, but there is some comfort provided in the idea that this is enough, all that we “need to know”. We remain unsettled by the object’s suggestion that there may be more to know than this, but that the limits of the human imagination can only reach so far; even if they reach far enough for a human life. Even this ‘more to know’ cannot really be considered as nonhuman, even if it hints at the limits of the human itself, as it is the imputed limits of the self-reflexive human imagination. And yet even these contentions are embedded in a broader contention, one which contextualises them and provides the true dramatic situation of the poem. This is that these three contentions are what an urn would say were it able to speak. So the communication of the nonhuman urn is possible only in the dis‐ course of the human poet. This remains open to a charge of anthropocentrism, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 The Silent Form that Teases Us Out of Thought: Keats’s Urn Revisited 63 but the poem itself heads off this charge by means of the unique status of its object: not only is the urn a human-made object, it is imaginative, having its existence sustained only by an act of the human imagination. As an imagined object it cannot, then, be truly nonhuman, contingent as it is on the human imagination. Whatever else Keats’s poem might or might not contend, whatever it might unsettle or upset in philosophy or aesthetic theory, it is a moving record of the existence - the human existence - of such imaginative objects. To reflect, then, on what all this could mean for posthumanist doctrine: if, as Tabbi claims, posthumanism might be seen as a “carrying forward” of humanist ideals, then poems like Keats’s offer an interesting test case. I posed the question at the beginning whether there can be such things as ‘nonhuman’ objects in literary works, because they depend on human imagination. Perhaps the posthumanism of literary studies may lie in the ways in which the human imagination synthesises an imagined, or fictional, capacity - or agency - of objects. Romanticism, with the self-conscious relation of the human imagination and the natural world being so central to its poets, offers a broad and fruitful area of study for this. The lyrical poetry of Keats, for example, is the turning of a human mind on its environment, not on itself; a narrow solipsistic view cannot account for this. Yet, a posthumanist understanding of objects far too often relies on literalist interpretations of what objects in artworks are. Such an interpretation cannot work with a poem in which the ontology of the imagined object is contingent on the creative power of the speaker. If the present author might be indulged a humanist warning: unless it can account for the power of imagination and figurative aesthetic practice in a way that diminishes the control of human creativity, posthumanism will be limited to non-literary objects. And this would be an impoverishment for literary studies and posthumanism alike. Works Cited Anselmo, Anna. 2020. “Posthuman Keats: Poetry as Assemblage”. Altre Modernità, January, 46-58. Arnold, Matthew. 1865. Essays in Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon. Bari, Shahidha. 2012. Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations. London: Routledge. Ağın , Başak/ Yılmaz, Z. Gizem. 2025. “Introduction: Towards an Ecological Posthuman‐ ism in English Studies”. 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Yeats, W.B. 1899. "The Moods." In: The Wind Among the Reeds. London: Elkin Mathews, 4. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0003 66 James Dowthwaite 1 I would like to thank the editors for their thoughtful comments and advice and my colleague Christopher Herzog for his input on ghosts and the transhuman continuum. This article springs from discussions with the students of my seminar “A Quest Through Medieval Literature” at the University of Duisburg-Essen (summer term 2024), who drew my attention to the “utter weirdness” of the talking fox in Lowery’s film and then introduced me to the concept of the backrooms, suggesting the liminal realm Gawain traverses on his quest constituted “medieval backrooms”. Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism Julia Boll The quest for greatness In search of honour yet unclear about what, precisely, this entails, aspiring knight Gawain (Dev Patel) plunges into Saint Winifred’s well to retrieve her severed head. His eyes blink open underwater and the boundaries of the earthly world dissolve. As the universe unfolds before him, he glimpses its vastness: Galaxies upon galaxies swirling in silent, intertwined motion. When he returns to the shore with Winifred’s skull in hand, he finds her gone. In her place sits the red fox that will become his companion for the remainder of his journey towards the Green Knight, a wood spirit with designs upon Gawain’s own head. The three nonhuman creatures serve as interlocutors, embodying the complex interplay between the human and nonhuman realm and urging Gawain towards a deeper understanding of wildness, interdependence, and vulnerability. The Green Knight, Winifred, and the fox point to aspects of each other, and to figures of nonhuman otherness. 1 The Green Knight, David Lowery’s 2021 film adaptation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a radical reinterpretation of a rich and multi-faceted text that, itself, already engages with longstanding themes of ethics, embodiment, and interconnectedness, which the film amplifies by displacing human-centred narratives and emphasising the autonomy of nature and spectral forces, reconfiguring the chivalric journey as a challenge to heroic anthropocentrism. The film thus reconfigures medieval motifs to address DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 2 All direct quotations from SGGK are taken from Gollancz (1940), except when otherwise noted. References by line number refer to the poem itself, consistent across all editions and translations referenced in this article. contemporary questions of agency and the boundaries between the human and nonhuman world. In this article, I argue that Lowery’s film expands the poem’s attention to nonhuman presence and interrelation while deepening its ethical implications. The film systematically undermines ideals of anthropocentric heroism, suggest‐ ing instead that ethical and existential growth emerges through relationality, exposure, and the influence of the more-than-human world. It reimagines the heroic quest as an encounter with vulnerability and forces beyond the human as active participants. I will show how this shift takes shape through the film’s attention to nonhuman perspectives. Reading the Green Knight’s challenge through Jack Halberstam’s notion of wildness allows us to understand it not as a test of individual valour, but as an invitation into temporal, spatial, and ethical disorientation that resonates with the film’s take on what I call “medieval backrooms”. Thinking about the film’s portrayal of relationality and entanglement through Karen Barad’s discussion of agency and intra-actions shifts our focus to Gawain’s intra-actions with various nonhuman entities, showing how these shape and co-constitute his identity and situate him within a broader system of interrelated agencies that open space for ethical engagement and blur boundaries between self and other, human and nonhuman, living and dead, making room for forms of spectral agency. This relational ethics converges with Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis, or “making-with”, in which beings come into existence through ongoing, uneven collaboration rather than individual autonomy, a dynamic further clarified by Anna Tsing’s distinction between environmental alienation and an understanding of contamination as the basis of life-enabling alternatives and mutual world-making. This culminates in a discussion of how the film can be read in terms of arboreal time, a temporality defined not by linear progression but by a thick present, by cycles, and by recursions bringing together past, present, and future into a continuous, material now. The film, I argue, invites us to inhabit an ethics grounded not in heroic transcendence, but in attentiveness to entanglement, vulnerability, and the more-than-human rhythms of time. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (hereafter SGGK  2 ), part of the Pearl Manu‐ script (BL Cotton Nero A.x, late fourteenth or early fifteenth century) and attributed to the anonymous “Gawain Poet” or “Pearl Poet”, is a fourteenth-cen‐ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 68 Julia Boll 3 The exact dating is unknown. Most recent scholars date the poem to around 1400, a premise also adopted by Simon Armitage in his popular translation (Armitage 2007: v). tury 3 chivalric romance written in Middle English alliterative verse and in a Midlands dialect. It is the tale of a beheading game and an exchange of winnings. At Christmas, the young and unproven Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from the enigmatic Green Knight, a liminal figure embodying the autonomous, regenerative force of the natural world. The terms of the game are simple: whatever blow Gawain deals must be returned in kind a year later. Gawain decapitates the Green Knight, who retrieves his head and reminds Gawain to meet him at the Green Chapel in a year and a day to uphold his end of the bargain. When Gawain sets out to keep his promise, his integrity and honour are tested by the Lord and Lady of the castle where he stays as a guest. While the Middle English poem has a narrative focus on Sir Gawain’s quest to confront mortality and mature into a valuable member of Arthur’s round table, emphasising courtly values and moral testing, it nonetheless already contains tensions between the human and nonhuman realms. Ultimately, the poem affirms a human moral order, yet as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out, it “clamours for ecological engagement” (2019: 25), anticipating themes later amplified in Lowery’s film adaptation. Cohen suggests that beyond the poem’s linear, traditionally masculine storyline of failure and attempted redemption lie subtler parallel narratives marked by “yearning and vitality, dormancy, season-change, lives glimpsed but not grasped, nonhuman tempos and dura‐ tions […], knotted structures of precarity and endurance” (26). He highlights the poem’s underlying celebration of a love of life, noting that the Green Knight spares Gawain precisely because of an ethos “that reverberates with a compassion for all things that want to survive and flourish” (46). From this reading emerges a “secular ethics of shared precarity” and an expansion of the poem’s spatial and temporal scope, “an enlarging of the here of the poem that widens but refuses to transcend” (48). This resonates with Haraway’s reading of the thick present, a mode of temporal and spatial alignment that resists linear progress and instead fosters a sustained, situated awareness of “an eco-temps” that foregrounds overlapping climatic rhythms, seasonal cycles, and place-based interconnectedness (2016: 1). As I suggest below, the notion of arboreal time provides a useful framework for understanding this temporal logic, one grounded in growth, branching, latency, and interdependence. Lowery’s film evokes the poem’s legacy by referencing its material history throughout. Visual details drawn from the BL Cotton Nero A.x manuscript are echoed in the film’s aesthetic, particularly in the chapter headings. The publi‐ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 69 4 SGGK was first printed in its entirety in 1839, edited by palaeographer Frederic Madden. The film’s typographical choices thus mostly allude to nineteenthand twentieth-cen‐ tury print editions ( “Boldest of Blood” 2021); for example, to the translation by Israel Gollancz (1897, published with Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society in 1940). cation history of the poem is also evoked through the stylised use of typography: Cycling through a series of title cards at the beginning, the phrase “Sir Gawain and…” appears three times, each in a different font, subtly referencing the poem’s fragmented textual transmission and its belated emergence into print culture 4 and echoing the first part of its Middle English title. In contrast, the second part, “The Green Knight”, which is also the film’s actual title, appears just once, at the very end of the film. When it finally does, it is steady and unwavering, superimposed onto a tree stump with visible concentric rings, suggestive of endurance and the passing of time. By omitting Gawain’s name from the title, the film shifts the focus away from the traditional hero-centred narrative and gives more space to the notion and function of the Green Knight, a choice that invites viewers to reconsider him not merely as an adversary or obstacle, but as a central agent whose presence shapes the thematic and ethical structure of the narrative, underscoring his role as a catalyst for transformation and as a symbol of nature’s ambivalence, as a mediator of nonhuman agency. Like the Middle English poem, Lowery’s film is a meditation on mortality and on what it means to live a meaningful life. As Gawain’s year of reprieve comes to an end and he prepares to set out to meet his fate, to become the knight he believes he is meant to be, his lover Essel questions his decision. She asks whether he will truly go and have his head chopped off by a mystical woodland spirit, and why he thinks this is a sound idea, when, instead, he could be with her. “For greatness”, Gawain replies. Essel pointedly responds, “Greatness? Why is goodness not enough? ” (00: 35: 17). As Robinson Murphy (2025) notes, Essel offers Gawain the possibility of a partnership, a life rooted in love and shared humanity, but Gawain chooses greatness and “honour” instead - a concept he clings to but ultimately fails to understand (1353) . A wild knight The Green Knight’s challenge to the court, in Lowery’s film read aloud by the Queen, is framed as a trial of courage: “Indulge me in this friendly Christmas game”, he says, “[l]et whichever of your knights is boldest of blood and wildest of heart set forth, take up arms, and try with honour to land a blow against me” (0: 17: 36). On the surface, this is a call to bravery, but symbolically, the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 70 Julia Boll knights of the round table are invited to take an axe to a tree (Higley 2022: 69), while “with honour” turns out to be the operative phrase here. 5 Crucially, the challenge is not to fell the Green Knight, merely to strike him. The test lies in the manner and measure of the blow, a distinction resonating, I suggest, with the film’s broader investment in arboreal time as a model of slow, cyclical persistence rather than the excessive gestures of heroic action. In the Middle English poem, a young King Arthur urges Sir Gawain to win the game (SGGK lines 372-374) , suggesting a competitive mindset geared towards what we might file under ‘classic heroics’. By contrast, the film adaptation presents an aged, more contemplative King who cautions Gawain to remember that “it is only a game” (00: 19: 54). The shift underscores a crucial thematic ambiguity already present in the poem: the exchange of blows could encompass anything (SGGK line 287; Dunai 2023: 457 f.). Instead of pausing to consider the implication of the challenge - which facet and interpretation of ‘honour’ might he be asked to demonstrate here? - Lowery’s Gawain follows his Middle English model and opts for decapitating the Green Knight, thus setting himself on a trajectory of violence and misunderstanding. It becomes evident that he has failed the test right from the outset: His rashness is met with visible shock from the King and the Queen, and with disappointment from his own mother. From an ecofeminist perspective, this opening act is especially jarring, a shocking display of unwarranted violence and an assertion of dominance over a being who poses no real threat, a decision that does not signify a triumph, but a failure of imagination, empathy, and restraint. Gawain’s quick resort to violence is reflected in the film’s visual landscape of ruin and desolation, particularly in the deforested, war-torn lands surrounding the King’s castle. As he departs the citadel on his journey to the Green Chapel, he passes through a former battlefield where he encounters a young scavenger who will later rob him. Throughout the film, human presence is often reduced to mere traces, to long-dead corpses rotting and overgrown by vegetation. The visual motifs echo Lowery’s reflection on humanity’s impact on a world it has destroyed: Nature will ultimately overtake civilisation and restore peace (“Boldest of Blood” 2021). His film offers a clear commentary on environmental ruin, voiced early in the film by Gawain himself, likely unwittingly, as he highlights the cost of humanity’s violence against both itself and the natural world when he tells the King: “Your knights have spilled enough blood in your name” (00: 10: 26). Murphy suggests that The Green Knight presents “an ecological DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 71 5 Note that the Middle English version does not mention “honour” (lines 283-287; see Gollancz’s translation, 1940: 10-11), nor does Anderson (1996: 179) in his slightly modified edition or Armitage (2007: 17) in his translation. ethics”, notably evident in the long, uninterrupted shot of Gawain crossing the postwar terrain (2025: 1352). This scene highlights the film’s critique of anthropogenic destruction, which culminates in a powerful reversal: Building on the established Freudian reading of the beheading games as symbolic castration (1350), the film ends with a tree figure that “castrates the deforesting human” (1355). In his seminal Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (1992), an exploration of forests as historical space, literary and religious topos, ambivalent motif, and as location of nostalgia in Western cultural imagination, Robert Pogue Harrison identifies the woods, real and imagined, as a sylvan fringe of darkness [that] defined the limits of [civilisation’s] cultivation, the margins of its cities, the boundaries of its institutional domain; but also the extravagance of its imagination. […] The governing institutions of the West - religion, law, family, city - originally established themselves in opposition to the forests […]. (ix) Harrison probes the forests’ religious and cultural function as places of both profanity and sacredness, sites of lawlessness as well as places of refuge; enchanting sites “where the logic of distinction goes astray” (x; see also Higley 2022: 55 f.). Commenting on the ambivalent relationship between the city and the wilderness, he argues that, in the imagination, the city will always be reclaimed by the wilderness, by what has been conquered (Harrison 1992: 2), and also indicates how sharply city and forest were traditionally juxtaposed (49). Medieval social order was restructured around emerging feudal and religious institutions, according to which certain areas were set aside and declared foris, meaning ‘outside’ the law and human society. As a site of asylum, the forest became “unspeakable”, Harrison writes, a space in which “[o]ne could not remain human […], one could only rise above or sink below the human level” (61). He also foregrounds the forest’s shapeand concept-shifting attributes which may turn the profane into something sacred, or, conversely, a knight into a wild man, a place where the shadow of a thing can always usurp or evert the thing itself. This notion of a shadow, a disacknowledged force lurking in the space outside civilisation, on the fringes of the citadel, in the wilderness, is taken up in The Green Knight at a dialectical level. “Why is it green, do you think? ” the Lady of the castle - the film’s counterpart to SGGK’s Lady Bertilak - asks Gawain, who has taken shelter in her and her husband’s home in the days leading up to Christmas. She refers to the Green Knight he is destined to meet soon. “Was it born that way? ” she muses, but Gawain replies “he is not of this earth” - to which the Lady counters that DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 72 Julia Boll green is the colour of earth, of all living things. Of life. […] We deck our hall with it and dye our linens. But should it come creeping up the cobbles, we scrub it out, fast as we can. When it blooms beneath our skin, we bleed it out. And when we, together all, find that our reach has exceeded our grasp, we cut it down, we stamp it down, we spread ourselves atop it and smother it beneath our bellies, but it comes back. It does not dally. And what is the point to plot or conspire to pull it out by its roots one day, and the next, there it is, creeping in around the edges. Whilst we’re off looking for red, in comes green. Red is the colour of lust, but green is what lust leaves behind, in heart, in womb. Green is what is left when ardour fades, when passion dies, when we die, too. When you go, your footprints will fill with grass. Moss shall cover your tombstone, and as the sun rises, green shall spread overall, in all its shades and hues. This verdigris will overtake your swords and your coins and your battlements, and, try as you might, all you hold dear will succumb to it. Your skin. Your bones. Your virtue. (01: 25: 20) Quite opposed to Gawain’s dismissal of green as otherworldly, the Lady’s meditation casts it as that which is not civilised, which cannot, ultimately, be tamed and controlled, but which is essential to existence. We can draw a line here to Jack Halberstam’s exploration of wildness, which he defines as “simultaneously a chaotic force of nature, the outside of categorization, unrestrained forms of embodiment, the refusal to submit to social regulation, loss of control, the unpredictable” (2020: 3). In his reading, “the wild” signifies a “space of potential” (3), but also of constructed alterity (18), and to privilege the wild is to privilege the subject who defies normative expectations and conventional structures by embracing disorder, unpredictability, and, above all, a refusal to be domesticated (23). In the Lady’s speech, green is aligned with the wild, not merely as nature and savagery, but as something deeply rooted in the earth, the seasons, and the cycles of life and death - clearly implying that the Green Knight, as a figure who embodies nature’s cyclical forces and eludes human comprehension and control, cannot be ‘defeated’ or bargained with, but is an incarnation of this wildness and thus, of the substance of life. His daring of the “wildest of heart” suggests a life beyond the rigid confines of chivalric codes and societal regulation, representing a transgressive force that challenges normative ideals of honour and heroism. This wildness is generative and productive, opening space for new forms of relationality between humans and nonhumans. The “wildest of heart” thus invites a queer, nonconforming wildness akin to Halberstam’s concept: a way of inhabiting the world that values fluidity, multiplicity, and radical openness over fixed identity and mastery. It pushes back against chivalric demands for restraint and conformity, suggesting that true growth arises from acknowledging and integrating the wild, untamed DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 73 6 The Green Knight’s conceptual overlap with the Green Man is a widely accepted interpretation, developed further by scholars such as Sarah L. Higley, who mentions Larry D. Benson (1965) and William F. Woods (2002) as major sources (Higley 2022: 66 fn. 25), and Carolyn Dinshaw (2013), who references John Speirs’ identical claim (1949; Dinshaw 2013: 352). parts of the self. At its core, it calls for Gawain to confront his fears and desires, to face the unknown within and outside himself, embracing uncertainty and vulnerability rather than seeking an elusive idea of greatness and honour (see also Cohen 2019: 39). In the film’s final moments, Gawain’s submission and acceptance is not the triumphant fulfilment of a chivalric quest, but a quiet surrender to a vast, impersonal natural order operating outside human comprehension and control. A nonhuman figure whose overall greenness is foregrounded quite insistently in SGGK (lines 147-220), the Green Knight evokes medieval folklore’s Green Man - a symbol of vegetal vitality, seasonal renewal, and the blurred boundary between human and nature. 6 In Lowery’s film, this connection is made literal: the Green Knight appears as an arboreal being, his body resembling gnarled, weathered wood, with bark and moss partially making up his face, his move‐ ments accompanied by creaks and groans suggestive of trees bending in the wind. He is not simply adorned with natural elements, but materially continuous with the forest. Carolyn Dinshaw’s reading of the Green Man as a site of ecological rupture and relationality offers an interesting lens here. In the figure of the Green Man, she writes, “what is supposed to be outside gush[es] from deep inside”, dismantling “the most basic conceptual boundary” between inside and outside (2013: 351). This collapse of divisions is vividly embodied in the film’s depiction of the Green Knight: he is not merely adorned with nature, but his body is composed of it, there is no fixed border where the human ends and the nonhuman begins, a fluidity the film’s imagery accentuates as his body ultimately fuses with the Green Chapel. For Dinshaw, the Green Man reveals how interdependency must be central to ecological thinking (353). Lowery’s Green Knight, in this sense, does not stand apart from the world as a mythic challenge to be overcome; rather, he embodies the inextricable relationality of all beings. His role, as will become clear below, is not simply to test Gawain, but to expose his entanglement with the world. A spectre’s agency In The Green Knight, spectral agency operates in the present without being fully visible or rationally graspable and can be understood as a kind of ‘ghost’ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 74 Julia Boll influencing the here and now, linking what is usually treated as separate - past and future, body and mind, human and nonhuman - through entanglement rather than direct action. About halfway through the film, Gawain finds himself in bed with a long-dead saint asking for his help. When he questions what he would gain by retrieving her head from a well, Winifred replies, nonplussed: “Why would you ask me that? Why would you ever ask me that? ! ” (00: 59: 30). The exchange exposes Gawain’s underlying transactional mindset: Winifred is neither reward nor guide, but an imposition for care, and it dawns on the would-be knight that genuine chivalry may require ethical commitment that goes unacknowledged and unreciprocated. Returning Winifred’s head happens at a private, eerie moment, with no audience, and hence, no glory; an act grounded in repair rather than conquest, resisting the usual game logic of knightly deeds. Yet this ostensibly non-transactional moment is problematised when Gawain’s previously stolen axe mysteriously reappears, suggesting that even acts of compassion may entail unintended consequences. Saint Winifred was a seventh-century Welsh virgin-martyr and later abbess, venerated in both medieval Welsh and English Christian tradition (Farmer 2004: 544 f.). According to hagiographic accounts, when she rejected the advances of a passing nobleman, he decapitated her; where her head fell, a healing spring miraculously sprang up. Her uncle, Saint Beuno, is said to have reattached her head and restored her to life (Callander 2023: 7). Although Winifred is absent from the Middle English poem, it makes reference to “Holy Head” (SGGK line 700), a name that resonates with Holywell, the site traditionally associated with Winifred’s beheading (Callander 2023: 5). In Lowery’s film, she appears as a spectral figure whose narrative mirrors Gawain’s own beheading challenge. Her scene disrupts the ritualised, reciprocal violence introduced by SGGK while deepening the film’s exploration of human-nonhuman interrelations and complicating the beheading motif central to the chivalric quest. Unlike the Green Knight’s beheading game, Winifred’s decapitation was not a contest or trial she willingly accepted, but an act of violence inflicted upon her, the encounter highlighting a crucial distinction between heroic ordeal and feminine martyrdom. Already beheaded, she does not offer duel or bargain but asks for the restoration of what has been taken from her: her head, her wholeness - a request that confronts Gawain’s passivity and unsettles the rationale behind knightly action. Her presence points to an ethical responsibility outside the chivalric code and even beyond human life. When, unsure of her corporeality, Gawain reaches out to touch her, Winifred recoils and rebukes him: “What are you doing? Do not touch me. A knight should know better” (00: 58: 15), reasserting her agency even in death and demanding he DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 75 recognise knightly conduct not merely as a matter of courage or honour, but of respect and recognition of the other’s vulnerability. But Gawain insists, asking whether she is real or a spirit. “What is the difference? ” she replies, “I just need my head” (01: 00: 12). Neither fully alive nor fully dead, Winifred’s ghostliness places her on a transhuman continuum oriented towards decay and persistence rather than closure. Her presence unsettles Cartesian divisions between mind and body, spirit and matter, while also destabilising the category of the human itself. Here, the nonhuman does not simply denote what lies outside the human, but what has historically been rendered Other, including nature itself - and what emerges when human identity is redistributed across material, ecological, and historical relations. As a resurrected martyr who later becomes a saint, Winifred exists outside the normative cycle of mortality, aligning more closely with the Green Knight than with Gawain as a figure who redefines what life and agency can mean (also see Higley 2022: 80 f.). No longer fully human, yet never entirely beyond the human, she occupies a threshold between human and more-than-human existence, in which agency is inseparable from place. Her identity is intertwined with the well she haunts, binding her to place and landscape rather than to a singular body. Gawain’s encounter with her thus becomes an immersive interaction not with an individual subject, but with the land itself, a crossing of the threshold between human agency and ecological memory. In this sense, Winifred's spectral body registers and echoes the violence enacted upon the land and materialises that violence, making visible how harm to human bodies and harm to landscapes are connected and persist across time. As he discusses the inclusion of Winifred into the film, Lowery reflects that her presence serves to steer Gawain “towards integrity, towards decency and chivalry”, with her legend offering a framework through which the film explores the character’s ethical development (Murphy 2021). Gawain’s momentary immersion in a cosmic vision upon entering the well confronts him with the immensity of a universe in which human agency is decentred and meaning is no longer derived from anthropocentric systems of value. “Every encounter he has in this movie changes him and brings him closer to death”, Lowery notes, adding, somewhat enigmatically, “he’s touching the cosmic” (Murphy 2021). This metaphysical rupture dissolves the boundaries between the earthly and the universal, reframing the well not as a confined space but as a site where geological depth, historical violence, and cosmic scale converge. Winifred’s violation, and its lingering aftermath, are thus placed within a broader ecological and ontological entanglement, situating human injury within a vastly extended field of relations and suggesting that harm, and responsibility, reverberate across scales, from bodies and landscapes to planetary and cosmic systems. By DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 76 Julia Boll retrieving her skull, Gawain participates in an act of reparation that signals an emergent, posthuman ethical sensibility grounded in attentiveness to the voiceless and the spectral; it is a gesture of healing that acknowledges an obligation to the more-than-human. This shift in ethical perspective invites us to revisit Barad’s influential work on quantum physics and entanglement, where ethics is understood not as a series of individual choices, but as an ongoing performative process, encouraging us to rethink relationships as constantly evolving, shaped and reshaped through repeated intra-actions. Barad argues that human agency does not pre-exist separately or independently but emerges from such relational in‐ tra-actions with humans and nonhumans. Distinct from interaction, intra-action denotes co-constitutive action among entities, including humans, originating ‘from within’ entangled systems, rather than between pre-existing, independent entities. Barad thus challenges subject-centred narratives and advocates inter‐ connectedness within entangled systems (2007, 25). “To be entangled”, they write, “is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair” (ix). Reframing intra-actions not as isolated exchanges between individuals, but as co-constitutive relationships embedded within broader systems, clarifies the connection between quantum entanglement and the idea that nothing exists in isolation. This perspective suggests a shared responsibility among co-constitutive entities that exists before and beyond choosing. Barad reads responsibility as an embodied relation, not as a chosen obligation, and concludes that ethics therefore have to be regarded as integral to the act of becoming rather than being added on as human-made rules about the world (2010: 265). A closer examination of Barad’s argument will help us grasp this ethical framework: grounded in the inseparability of ethics and ontology (2007: 225), they propose that existence itself is inherently relational, entangled with others, both humans and nonhumans. This ontological entanglement creates ethical responsibilities in all intra-actions. Intra-actions are not neutral exchanges but active sites where the world is materially and ethically reconfigured: They can reinforce or disrupt systems of domination and oppression. While Barad critiques anthropocentrism, their framework does not erase human agency, especially in the context of ethical responsibility. In fact, they argue that human actions play a significant role in shaping the world, precisely because they are entangled with broader material, social, and ecological networks (2007: 392 f.). Ethics is not something added to experience from the outside, but it is the very basis of experience itself: it “grounds human experience (not the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 77 other way around)” (391). From this perspective, change is not an individual accomplishment but a collective and ongoing process of becoming-with others. Lowery’s film resonates strongly with this approach to entangled ethics, dismantling the closed, teleological loop of medieval chivalric testing in favour of a porous, ambiguous path, shaped by encounters with nonhuman forces and spectral presences throughout Gawain’s quest. His response to Winifred is one of hesitant care rather than heroic resolve, an opening towards respon‐ sibility rooted in responsiveness to suffering within a shared material world. This intra-action opens a space for ethical engagement and reconfigures the relational field. Boundaries between self and other, human and nonhuman, living and dead begin to dissolve once we take spectral agency into account. It does not simply linger from the past, but actively shapes the present, creating new realities and subject positions. Drawing on Barad’s concept of intra-action, where agency arises from within encounters rather than preceding them, spectral agency can be understood as a particular form of this emergent force, often invisible yet powerful, that arises in specific temporal conditions, where past, present, and future compress and intertwine. In these moments, it produces effects that exceed immediate perception or direct action, pushing against the limits of what we usually recognise as active, alive, or familiar. Ghosts emerge as a productive figure for thinking about agency that is present yet not fully material, influencing the present by returning, lingering, and demanding response (Gordon 1997). The film's Saint Winifred embodies this mode of agency as a ghost of reckoning, as she does not restore a damaged past, but materialises the ongoing interrelation of past, present, and future. In Barad’s terms, such ghosts are not remnants of what is over, but iterative, material reconfigurations that demand response rather than resolution (2010: 264). Following the medieval ghost tradition, Winifred returns not to be exorcised but to demand recognition of wrongdoing and the fulfilment of obligations that bind the living to the dead. While the initial encounter with the Green Knight serves as an example of Gawain’s intra-action with the more-than-human world and sets into motion his journey of self, the film's ethical force does not only reside solely in the Green Knight’s visibly material embodiment of nature. It is distributed, rather, across a network of spectral, material, and environmental agencies, Winifred among them, that collectively shape Gawain’s becoming and situate responsibility as shared and relational. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 78 Julia Boll An uncanny fox roaming the backrooms When Gawain resurfaces from the well, the ritual of restoration is completed and Winifred is gone. Yet her presence lingers, transfigured into a new form: a red fox who, from now on, accompanies Gawain (01: 02: 21). As a liminal, shape-shifting figure, the fox mediates between the human and nonhuman realms, reflecting the threshold Gawain himself now inhabits. It resonates with the other nonhuman figures in both the film and the Middle English poem, including the Green Knight himself. Like him, the fox is elusive, ambiguous, and tied to a deeper, impersonal natural order that remains beyond Gawain’s grasp. Timothy C. Baker’s Writing Animals explores this connection through his analysis of “vulpine transformation” (2019: 79). He argues that foxes in literature “challenge binaries between symbolic and experience-based interpretation, between wild and tame, between living and dead”, stressing their resonance when negotiating thresholds (77). In SGGK, the “exchange of winnings” pact requires Sir Gawain and Lord Bertilak to trade whatever they gain each day. For two days, Gawain honours the agreement, trading kisses received from the Lady of the castle for Bertilak’s hunted animals. On the third day, however, when Bertilak returns with a fox as the final prize of his hunt, Gawain withholds the green girdle given to him by the Lady, a magical token said to protect its wearer from death. Fearing for his life in the coming encounter with the Green Knight, he hides the gift, violating the pact and committing a moral failure (SGGK lines 1830-1951). The fox’s fate in the poem is thus closely linked to Gawain’s deception, symbolising Gawain’s moral ambiguity. In the film, the fox is given agency and a literal and metaphorical voice. It prominently features in the visual tapestry at the Lord’s hall, foreshadowing its deeper narrative role. And when Gawain prepares to cross the final threshold of his journey, about to board a boat that will take him to the Green Chapel, the fox suddenly blocks his path and speaks in an unsettling, distorted voice: “Go that way and your doom is at hand”, he warns, “you will find no mercy. No happy end” (01: 38: 00). This moment echoes the anonymous servant in the poem, who tries to dissuade Gawain from confronting the Green Knight (SGGK lines 2091-2125) . Gawain ignores the fox’s warning and, when confronted about the girdle, drives him away, rejecting its company and insisting it was never wanted. By warning Gawain, and by knowing about the girdle - a detail never directly explained but suggestive of its embeddedness in the Green Knight’s larger web (01: 38: 32) - the fox hints at its deeper connection to the forest’s moral and ecological order. In this sense, the fox, like the Green Knight and the Lord of the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 79 castle, appears not as an isolated figure but as part of an interconnected system. Just as Lord Bertilak and the Green Knight are ultimately revealed to be one and the same in SGGK, the film gestures towards a similar, if more diffuse, merging of identities. The talking fox also draws on the medieval tradition of bestiaries and beast-fables, particularly the literary cycle of Reynard the Fox (Bouwman and Besamusca 2009: 10-14; see also Harty 2022: 41 f.). As a cunning trickster in a world of anthropomorphic animals, Reynard embodies traits of intelligence, ambiguity, and subversion. The name Reynard itself, derived from Reginhard or Raginohardus (‘strong in counsel’), underscores the fox’s role as both guide and challenger. In SGGK, the fox, with its literary reputation of cleverness and duplicity, appears as the final prize of the hunt, yet mirrors Gawain’s own concealment of the girdle. In The Green Knight, this symbolic alignment deepens. No longer merely prey or allegorical mirror, the fox becomes an agent with its own voice and presence, related to Gawain’s inner conflict. Its ability to speak for and across human and nonhuman realms evokes Baker’s idea of metamorphosis not as a switch from one identity to another but as the emergence of “a wholly new perspective” (2019: 86). Thus, the film’s fox challenges anthropocentric storytelling through its liminal being, evoking the material and ethical complexities that lie beyond human dominance by actively trying to derail Gawain’s quest. Just before the fox begins to speak and thus breaks the boundary between animal and human communication, the film’s colour palette shifts dramatically (01: 37: 10). A yellow hue floods the screen, marking a sudden plunge into the uncanny. This aesthetic transformation evokes the eerie atmosphere of the internet ‘backrooms’ meme: a space defined by its oppressive liminality, where buzzing, flickering lights and endless, bland yellow corridors, such as one might find in office buildings or large hotels, suggest infinite dislocation (Cho & Underberg-Goode 2025: 17) and a space of transition. Yet Lowery’s film transposes this affect from a digital urban vision into the open space of a mythic, war-torn landscape. Here, the backrooms logic is not confined to fluorescent-lit interiors but leaks into the open wilderness, suggesting that the natural world can become unstable, recursive, and estranged; a dreamlike structure where meaning becomes unmoored. What was once familiar, perhaps even taken for granted - the landscape, the fox, the journey - is momentarily rendered uncanny when the talking fox becomes not just a folkloric figure but a glitch in the perceptual and narrative order, an intrusion revealing the instability of the world itself. The scene invites us to think back to Halberstam’s notion of wildness as a mode of existence that is unpredictable and resistant to normative DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 80 Julia Boll structures, be they social, spatial, or temporal. As a site of ethical and perceptual reconfiguration, wildness sees conventional relational boundaries dissolve and makes space for new modes of encounter and affective engagement. Thinking alongside Halberstam, we might read this scene, which evokes the backrooms but transposes them into a medieval outside space, as a manifestation of queer ecologies, in which the natural world itself becomes wild: destabilised, recursive, and estranged. Just as wildness theorises radical forms of life and desire that resist capture by dominant systems, these spaces - forests, wildernesses, and medieval liminal zones alike - resist normative order and thus feel both thrilling and unsettling, uncanny in their simultaneous familiarity and estrangement. The wild emerges here as a space of potential, but also as a constructed Other, where fixed identity and mastery are challenged by fluidity, multiplicity, and unpredictability. In this sense, the medieval backrooms, while framed as marginal or uncanny, invite us to engage with them as queer, non-conforming spaces of possibility, where the repressed and unfamiliar return to reshape the recognisable world. It is in this liminal, destabilised space that the fox offers his cryptic warning to Gawain: “He who you meet is as wild as I, but knows no measure” (01: 38: 03). Yet, true to the film’s many ambiguities, it is unclear whether this is a cautionary warning or a test of resolve. The fox embodies a form of wildness that is somewhat knowable and contained, while the Green Knight represents a more essential, excessive wildness that transcends human understanding and control, offering not only a challenge but also a form of radical freedom. Following Halberstam, this wildness embraces existence beyond human limits, opening space for alternative ways of being and ethical engagement precisely because it knows no measure. By destabilising any fixed ‘natural order’, it allows the natural, mythical, and uncanny to intermingle, revealing a world that is contingent, malleable, and open to transformation. Arboreal time “Is this really all there is? ” Gawain asks, as the Green Knight is about to chop his head off. “What else ought there to be? ” the Green Knight retorts (01: 47: 10). Just as he raises his axe to deliver the return blow, Gawain flinches, and the film launches into an imagined alternative future in which he runs away, returns to the citadel, becomes king, betrays and abandons his lover Essel, marries for power, loses his kingdom, is forsaken by his family and ultimately dies in a ruinous war - a dream vision of a self-centred life built on domination, ambition, and destruction (Harty 2022: 34). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 81 Gawain’s premonition of a fractured, self-serving existence echoes the alienation and disconnection that anthropologist Anna Tsing highlights as fundamental to capitalism’s exploitation of both humans and the environment. She contends that the system’s accumulation of wealth depends on turning “both humans and nonhumans into resources for investment”, cut off from the interrelations of living (2015: 5). Expanding Marx’s concept of alienation, Tsing shows how this process detaches both humans and nonhumans from their life-worlds to become exchangeable assets (121). Yet this severance is never total. For Tsing, contamination, rather than isolation, forms the basis of life: a condition of ongoing entanglement that enables new directions and mutual world-making (27). Even in the ruins of capitalist destruction, she suggests, possibilities persist for “surviving collaboratively in disturbance and contamination” (4). Haraway extends this approach, rejecting the self-bounded logic of neo‐ liberalism in favour of what she terms sympoiesis, by which she means “making-with” others in a mode of co-creation and response-ability (2016: 33), chiming with Barad’s notion of change as a becoming-with others. In a world defined by ecological and ontological interdependence, she argues, bounded individualism is no longer viable and Barad’s agential realism, where entities emerge through relations, is becoming a new common sense (Haraway 2016: 34). To recapitulate: while Barad uses the concept of intra-action to describe how phenomena are dynamically fused, Haraway focuses on the notion of symbiotic ‘worlds-with’ for co-creation and survival. Where these two approaches come together is in their mutual challenge of individualistic views, in their emphasis on how entities emerge and are co-constituted through relational entanglement. Entanglement, then, is not a problem to be solved but a generative force. As Cohen writes in reference to the Green Knight carrying his own severed head, “cutting something off will not extract it from entanglement” (2019: 26). This image - present both in SGGK and in Lowery’s adaptation - makes clear that the illusion of separability is exposed, revealing not heroic autonomy but the enduring, unruly persistence of connection. Cohen reflects on the Green Chapel in SGGK, observing how “[l]eaf and stem flourish, become overgrown. Is that not how the Green Chapel was swallowed into ruin, reuse, rebirth? ” (37). Lowery’s film vividly realises this vision: the Green Chapel, a man-made structure almost entirely reclaimed by nature, its stone walls covered in ivy, moss, and lichen, folded seamlessly into the forest. The Green Knight seems to have grown into the chapel itself, entwined with its structure, waiting in stillness like a seasonal deity. The setting evokes both ecological transformation and the Yuletide context of the tale - a period of DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 82 Julia Boll transition, death, and renewal - aligning the Green Knight with festive and vegetative cycles and positioning the Chapel as a site of judgment and rebirth. Drawing on the Lady’s imagery of a green that spreads overall, the Chapel is not destroyed, but transformed, overtaken by slow-growing life moving according to what might be called arboreal time, a temporality defined not by linear progression but by cycles and recursions, a slow, interconnected sense of time experienced through trees and embracing ecological rhythms, contrasting with linear human time. Like trees, whose rings, roots, and canopies register time simultaneously, arboreal time holds together past, present, and future within a continuous, materially grounded thick present, a layered now in which tempo‐ ral moments remain perceptible and co-constitutive, expanding, overlapping, and refusing linear containment. Arboreal time evokes the ‘ancient patience’ embodied by the Green Knight, challenging human-centred perspectives by foregrounding interconnectedness, non-linear branching, and a slow, materially grounded alternative to abstract, linear accounts of time. The near-total absence of artificial sound in this scene enhances the sense of temporal dislocation (01: 42: 30). The film’s cyclic structure has been explored by Alan van Beek, who links it to the poem’s famous bob-and-wheel form, noting that the wheel’s four-line pattern in SGGK already echoes the cycle of the seasons, a formal repetition that the film translates into visual and cinematographic techniques (2025: 198). Justine Breton also examines cyclic temporality, starting from the motif of ‘tempus fugit’ to analyse how the film constructs “elliptical” chapters (2024: 142, 147). She emphasises a sense of “hurried time, reinforced by elliptical editing” and identifies an aesthetic echo of Greek notions of cyclic time, particularly the concept of Aiôn, which she links to circular imagery and round shapes (150). However, where Aiôn depicts repetition as stasis, arboreal time allows for slow, persistent transformation. It unfolds unevenly, through growth and endurance, builds through sedimentation rather than acceleration, and responds to environmental conditions across multiple scales. As such, it offers a concrete model for understanding the thick present not as stasis, but as a dynamic, relational form of temporal becoming. This complex temporality is conveyed, visually and structurally, most pow‐ erfully early in Gawain’s journey when he is robbed by scavengers, bound, and left to die in the forest. Around him, nature begins to reclaim his body: daffodils and crocuses bloom (00: 50: 36), signalling not an end in decay, but a transformation. As the camera slowly pulls away, circling his decomposing form, its motion echoes the concentric rings of a tree trunk, reinforcing a sense of cyclical, non-linear time. This moment unfolds as a thick present, where past, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 83 present, and possible futures converge. Rather than progressing in a straight line, time folds back in on itself, and when the camera returns to Gawain, we find him alive, struggling fiercely to free himself from his bonds. Though this vision of mortality suggests Gawain’s death, it functions as a test of his desire for life, his fear of dissolution, and his relationship to the more-than-human world. Within this arboreal temporality, ethical growth is no longer driven by linear progress or heroic destiny, but emerges from a sense of relational entanglement and a readiness to relinquish control. For much of his journey, Gawain moves through a world that is not merely indifferent but actively hostile, a landscape that seeks to absorb and reshape him before he is ready. His quest becomes less about honour or heroic completion and more a reckoning with mortality on terms beyond his control. The film’s refusal of triumphant closure can be read as an ethical gesture: Gawain’s ‘success’ is his unmaking as an exceptional human. In place of human-centred heroism, which it critiques, the film suggests that to face the future - ecologically, ethically, and spiritually - we must relinquish the fantasy of the exceptional human at the centre of every story and learn instead how to be decentred, haunted, and companioned by the wild world that we have never fully left. Returning to my central argument, The Green Knight rescripts the heroic quest as an encounter with vulnerability and nonhuman agency. The film proposes a new model of ethical formation based on relationality and affective exposure. Building on Geraldine Heng’s landmark 1991-essay, we can discern a “feminine text” perceptible only “at the limits of the masculine narrative” (501; Dunai 2023: 458). Heng argues that the women in SGGK are arranged like “constituents of the pentangle” (1991: 503), forming a structural and symbolic network within, and yet often beyond, the poem’s overt chivalric logic. I suggest that Lowery’s film echoes this insight by arranging its key nonhuman and liminal figures - the Green Knight, Winifred, and the Fox - in similarly interlinked and reflective ways: the headless Green Knight is mirrored by the headless Winifred; the talking spectre by the speaking fox; the fox as nature-spirit by the Knight himself as an arboreal figure. Each wild thing here gestures towards the others, collectively challenging Gawain’s linear trajectory with a web of entanglements that exceeds - and finally unravels - the fabric of the heroic quest narrative. As Higley notes, “[w]hile we will never see the nonhuman world through other than human lenses, we can attempt to give it greater representation than we have” (2022: 86). The film’s nonhuman figures act as ethical co-agents, not merely symbols or obstacles: the fox offers an alternative, Saint Winifred demands a non-transactional response, the Green Knight invites surrender. The interactions model a shared, interspecies ethics in which humans must reckon DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 84 Julia Boll with intelligences and demands that do not mirror their own. In doing so, the set-up challenges the quester’s role as the sole agent of ethical change and moral consequence. Gawain only begins to grasp what honour might mean after glimpsing, through a vivid flash-forward into a possible future, how his aggressive pursuit of legacy and clinging to the superiority of his own life will inevitably lead to ruin. When he finally concedes to decentring himself, ceding control and handing his agency to the Green Knight, by making himself precarious, his final act of removing the girdle and bowing his head is not an assertion of will, but its relinquishment, refiguring heroism as vulnerability. With the path of traditional heroism abandoned, ethical unbecoming may replace the performance of virtue for recognition, a letting go of inherited roles in favour of radical co-existence, learning, in this process, what it means to become wildest of heart. Works Cited Anderson, J. J., ed. 1996. Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 1976. London: Dent/ Everyman. Armitage, Simon, trans. 2007. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. London: Faber and Faber. Baker, Timothy C. 2019. Writing Animals. Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, Karen. 2010. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheri‐ tance: Dis/ continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come”. Derrida Today 3/ 2: 240-268. Benson, Larry D. 1965. 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(USA and Canada) A24 Films. 140 mins. Madden, Frederic. 1839. Sir Gawayne: A Collection of Ancient Romance-Poems, by Scottish and English Authors, Relating to that Celebrated Knight of the Round Table. London: Richard & John E. Taylor. Murphy, Mekado. 2021. “‘The Green Knight’: Anatomy of a Scene”. The New York Times and A24 Films, 30 July. 5 mins. https: / / www.nytimes.com/ video/ movies/ 10000000789 5893/ the-green-knight-scene.html. Murphy, Robinson. 2025. “The Death-Driven Eco-Ethics of David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021) and Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017)”. Quarterly Review of Film and Video 42/ 5, 1350-1368. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 86 Julia Boll Speirs, John. 1949. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. Scrutiny 16/ 4, 24-30. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van Beek, Alan Lena. 2025. “Artusroman reloaded. Zur zyklischen Struktur des Scheiterns in The Green Knight (2021)“. In: Bendheim, Amelie/ Disselhoff, Dennis, eds. Mittelalter im Medientransfer. Rezeptionswege vormoderner Literatur. Bielefeld: transcript, 191- 207. Woods, William F. 2002. “Nature and the Inner Man in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. Chaucer Review 36/ 3, 209‒227. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0004 Wildest of Heart: How The Green Knight (2021) Challenges Human Exceptionalism 87 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse Xaver Boxhammer Introduction In 2017, Videocult’s post-apocalyptic platforming adventure game Rain World was released to mixed reviews, with critics lauding the game’s beautiful environment and animations but struggling with its unrelenting difficulty. IGN’s Joe Skrebels notes that Rain World’s “beauty can’t compensate for a design that works against the player” (2017) and PlayStation Country remarks that the game is neither “fun or easy and seems to actively frustrate any understanding of whats [sic] going on” (2017). These negative reviews notwithstanding, Rain World, designed by Joar Jakobsson and James Therrien, has since garnered a cult following in the independent games community and received two comparatively successful expansions, Downpour (2023) and The Watcher (2025). While a frustration with an unwillingness to provide any substantive help to the player might point to a salient attitude in contemporary games journalism that video games should be “first and foremost fun” (Ruberg 2015: 108), it is precisely the game’s frustrating non-player-centric game design that makes it a key site for exploring how digital games can productively engage with the nonhuman. This paper argues that Rain World engages with the nonhuman by exposing limitations to understanding nonhuman agents through nonhuman-oriented game design. The game subverts the anthropocentric paradigm that players can demand total comprehension from the video games they play by means of its complex story, fragmented narrative discourse, procedural simulation, and emergent creature behaviour. Thereby, Rain World functions as an example of nonhuman-oriented game design, because it creates strange environments and indifferent systems invested in deconstructing notions of human exceptional‐ ism. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Nonhuman perspectives and anthropocentric game design conventions Game Studies, at large, have participated in debates about the nonhuman from multiple perspectives. Scholars have been interested in questions of embodiment when playing animals (Fuchs 2021; Caracciolo 2021; Bianchi 2024) and plants (Seller 2020), often from a decidedly ecocritical perspective (Ruffino 2020; Tyler 2022; Ruffino 2024). They interrogate how digital games can foster empathy towards the nonhuman (Woolbright 2017; Fava et al. 2019), how games utilise affect to make statements about the nonhuman (Lyons and Jaloza 2016), and how player-game relations mirror human-nonhuman entanglements ( Janik 2021). Nonhuman perspectives are particularly invested in questioning to what extent games can make the nonhuman legible through “becoming-animal” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 275), and many serious games partake in this discourse. The underlying tension within this discourse revolves around whether digital games, interfaces created and operated by humans, can meaningfully represent the nonhuman beyond appropriating it as set dressing. While Lauren Wool‐ bright argues that “playing a nonhuman in a video game could help dissolve the separation we cultivate between our ‘human’ selves and our ‘animal’ selves and bring us into a clearer understanding of our natural context” (2017: 97), scholars like Marco Caracciolo criticise this perspective as an “illusion that, through videogame simulation, players may really be able to understand and appropriate animal ways of life” (2021). The central issue in representations of nonhuman agents in digital games is that, to make video games accessible to human players, digital games have to rely on anthropocentric game design conventions, both in their employment of narrative and their ludic makeup (Fizek 2018: 206): Nonhuman modes of perception are anthropomorphised, narratives featuring nonhuman actants follow standard linear templates of adventure fiction (Bianchi 2024: 65), simulated ecosystems locate agency only within player-characters, and nonhuman creatures move in predictable, scripted patterns (Ruffino 2024: 14). While, in many video games, the player-character might be a nonhuman creature, underlying mechanics humanise the nonhuman rather than making the player actually embody a mode of nonhuman cognition. How then, if any attempt to make the nonhuman playable necessarily anthropomorphises it, can digital games productively engage with the category of the nonhuman? In line with Michael Fuchs, this paper argues that it is precisely through exposing the medium’s “limitation on the part of humans [to comprehend the nonhuman], thereby undermining the notion of humankind’s undisputed superiority to other life forms on the planet” (Fuchs 2021: 268 f.). Through making overt the anthropomorphisms entrenched in established game DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 90 Xaver Boxhammer design conventions, digital games like Rain World can make arguments about the limits of human comprehension in relation to the nonhuman. In the subsequent analysis, I argue that Rain World, as a platforming adven‐ ture game, exists in a genre whose canon is particularly anthropocentric, often following archetypal heroic narrative conventions, both in plot and narrative discourse, and providing easily understandable scripted environments. The game actively subverts these generic conventions by constructing strange environments and indifferent ecosystems that decentre the player-character's primacy through using emergence as a core feature of its game design. Rather than playing a central role in shaping the gameworld, the player-character only plays a subordinated role in an ever-changing ecosystem that is largely indifferent to the player’s actions. Coupled with its unrelenting difficulty, post-apocalyptic setting, and a complex story that revolves around questions of nonhuman consciousness and artificial intelligence, the game challenges the assumption of player agency and human exceptionalism ingrained in the canon of platforming adventure games. Through this, Rain World invites players to reflect on the limitations of anthropocentric game design conventions that have become naturalised in the genre of the platforming adventure game. Aesthetics, plot, and the subversion of human/ nonhuman dualisms Most canonised platforming adventure games, such as the Super Mario (Nin‐ tendo 1985- ) series, make use of archetypal heroic narratives in which the player takes on the role of a human or humanoid protagonist. In these games, the division between the human and the nonhuman is clear: In Super Mario, Mario (human) has to save Princess Peach (human) by defeating Bowser (nonhuman) and his minions (nonhuman). To do this, he can enlist the help of nonhuman creatures like Yoshi and Toad, but these creatures only exist as set dressing or as tools for the player to use and often sacrifice in the process. Taking its cue from this influential and genre-defining series, the narrative setup of conventional platforming adventure games usually centres human experience, while the nonhuman is to be overcome or used for the purposes of human progress (Valeriano and Habel 2016: 478). Rain World breaks with this generic tradition by centring its narrative around chimeric creatures and artificial intelligences. In its plot and aesthetics, the game subverts generically entrenched human/ nonhuman dualisms and puts into question the established borders between the human and the nonhuman. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 91 In Rain World, the player takes control of ‘Slugcat’, a creature that, as its name suggests, presents as a hybrid between a slug and a cat. Having been swept away from its kin by a raging torrent, it traverses a strange world that consists of industrial ruins and a rich wildlife which has seemingly made these ruins its own. Rain World’s gameplay loop follows the generic structure of the survival game in that the gameplay is divided into cycles which Slugcat needs to survive through, each cycle being its own desperate race for sustenance in a hostile gameworld. The player must gather enough critters and berries to avoid starvation and then reach a shelter before the eponymous rain starts falling, delivering a swift death to any creature exposed in the open. There is no traditional tutorial; rather, the player, just like Slugcat, is thrown into this unforgiving world without any input about where to go and what to do. What is more, the gameworld is populated by a myriad of strange hybrid creatures, which, while not necessarily hostile, are far stronger than Slugcat and act as an immense threat to the player whose avatar seems to be at the bottom of the ecosystem’s pecking order. Driven by resource scarcity, the player explores the game’s different biomes and, through this, learns about the lore of the gameworld and Slugcat’s involvement in it. Aesthetically, the game engenders a stark contrast between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ in its use of colours. While the ruinous industrial landscapes, characterised by static pipes, tubes, gears, and fans, occur almost exclusively in deep purples, browns, and greys, the wildlife, which seems to have reclaimed the space, is characterised by neon greens, reds, and blues. Fig. 1: Screenshot from the game’s Sky Islands region (Videocult 2017). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 92 Xaver Boxhammer 1 Though it is never made overt, the ancients are coded as human through the aesthetics of the industrial infrastructure they have left behind. Figure 1 shows a room in the game’s sky island region. While the midground layer consists of a dilapidated megastructure with some satellite dishes, the background layer is made up of clouds. In the foreground, players can scale a sky island, a long-forgotten radio tower. Perched upon the radio tower is a ‘centiwing’ whose many wings oscillate between an iridescent blue and green. The colourful and dynamic centiwing starkly contrasts the static industrial structure, which is tinged in a sepia brown. Through its colour coding, the gameworld relates the notion that these ruins of a prior civilisation belong to the past, while the decidedly nonhuman creature that, in its positioning in the gameworld, resides atop this faded structure, is presented in vibrant, ever-changing colours. The only object that is not static is the continuously changing centiwing on the foreground layer, suggesting it has superseded the industrial age in which these structures were built. In its idiosyncratic pixel art aesthetic, the gameworld’s environment presents an assemblage of different textures and colours that form the sense of a past and faded civilisation superseded by new and vibrant wildlife. This maps binary sets such as static/ dynamic, dull/ beautiful, decaying/ thriving, past/ present onto the gameworld’s opposition of artificial/ natural. In doing so, Rain World deliberately reinforces a binary relationship between the ‘natural’ ecosystem and the ‘artificial’ industrial ruins by way of its visual language and narrative architecture, only to later deconstruct these dualisms through revealing the reality of the gameworld to the player. At the core of the game’s narrative is the theme of ‘ascension’, which the game sets up as the solution to the gameworld’s central conflict: The ‘great cycle’, a continuous loop of death and reset life that all creatures in Rain World are unable to escape from. The ‘ancients’, a technologically advanced civilisation that has long ascended this great cycle, only managed to solve the problem of ascension on an individual level but were not able to find a solution for the nonhuman creatures that populate the gameworld. 1 To find a way out of the great cycle for all creatures, the ancients constructed the ‘iterators’, artificially intelligent biomechanical superstructures the size of cities. Their purpose was to find a solution to this ‘big problem’ by iterating through all possible scenarios and simulations that could help the nonhuman creatures escape. These iterators were only allowed to stop iterating on the big problem if they found a solution that plausibly returns a confirmation which is portable and whose technical implementation is possible and generally applicable. This is referred to as the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 93 ‘Triple Affirmative’, which, at the time of the game’s events, has not been found yet. While the player cannot gather any concrete information about the logistics of the great cycle, she learns of the physical and emotional turmoil that resurrection entails. Structurally, this narrative setup serves as a convenient in-world explanation for why the player-character cannot die properly. Instead of the narrative inconsistencies that the ludic logics of failure and retry necessarily provoke in the narratively multiple medium of the video game (Mukherjee 2013: 110), the great cycle of death and rebirth is pulled into the diegesis as an obstacle to ultimately overcome by ‘ascending’. Through this, Rain World provides a canonical reason for the “violation of the truth-condition of singular mortality” (Ensslin 2015: 53) that is an integral part of most video games. Escaping the endless loop of death and reset life, both in the game’s plot and the experience of play, can only be achieved by beating the game. The parallels between the game’s mechanics and plot make the ludic conventions entrenched in the medium of the digital game graspable, thereby allowing for a moment of self-reflexivity on the medium’s structural necessities: Only if the player beats the game or stops playing out of frustration, can the gruelling cycle of death and rebirth, which is inherent to the logic of the gameworld, be broken. Throughout the course of the game, the player then learns that the computing power needed to solve the big problem was so immense that all the industrial landscapes which make up the gameworld and the entirety of the ecosystem that exists within it are parts of the iterators and that the Slugcats themselves were only created to clean out the iterators’ pipes. While players might have assumed they were playing an animal, they learn that their avatar is just as much part of the biomechanical constructs in this gameworld as it is natural; it has always been a cyborgian assemblage of human, technological, environmental, and material entities. Even the weather, in the form of the titular rain that ravages the gameworld at the end of each cycle, is the result of the iterators’ self-cleaning mechanism. The plot, with its consecutive revelations, serves to estrange the player from the conventions of human-centred video game narratives that are generically entrenched in the genre of the platforming adventure game. This decentring is further advanced through the iterators Looks to the Moon, Five Pebbles, and Sliver of Straw, which function as characters that are decidedly not human, as they are massive supercomputers tasked with solving an arithmetic problem, but, to the player, they are the most intelligible, as their actions and motivations are by far the easiest to comprehend. The artificial intelligences are fully conscious and have distinct personalities; they feel, they argue, they suffer, and they are the only entities that communicate in DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 94 Xaver Boxhammer speech. They are the ones who encode and decode the data pearls for Slugcat, being indispensable for making sense of the gameworld, and they provide the only directions the player gets. What is more, their inability to stop iterating on the big problem is hard-coded into their ontology through a line of code that prevents self-termination, mirroring the gameworld’s inability to ascend from the great cycle and the player’s mode of play. Condemned to endlessly toil away at the big problem and encouraged by Sliver of Straw’s apparent self-termination after broadcasting the triple affirmative, the iterators have been split into different philosophical fractions, some of which believe that the solution to the big problem would naturally result in self-termination (‘triangulators’) while others believe that there is no universal solution to the problem of immortality for all creatures, as it necessitates consciousness on an individual level (‘sliverists’). Essentially, their struggles mirror the ancients’ struggles and their debates about who can and cannot ascend are inextricably tied to differing positions on the hard problem of consciousness. This further blurs the lines between the technologically artificial nonhuman and the human. Against this backdrop, it becomes impossible to uphold the “conceptual or rhetorical dualisms that separate the human from the nonhuman” (Grusin 2015: x), which the game initially evokes through its aesthetics and its employment of the post-apocalyptic ruin. In this sense, Rain World plays with and subverts notions of biological essentialism. Who is conscious, who gets to perceive, know, communicate, affect, and die, is never fixed; it is constantly in a state of flux, at once tethered to and disconnected from the material realities of the gameworld. Each new twist in the narrative builds on this subversion and reveals new entanglements between the different agents and environments in the gameworld, but those revelations are always just shy of conclusively answering any of the big problems present in Slugcat’s world. Instead of posing that the iterators are just like the ancients or that the ecosystem itself is agentic and conscious, it invites players to challenge the human/ nonhuman dualism and, at the same time, accept the impossibility of ever knowing the concrete relationships between the two, reminding players of the limits of human understanding in depictions of the nonhuman. Non-anthropocentric narration as narrative mode This subchapter argues that Rain World employs a specific narrative mode which probes the presuppositions of anthropocentric narrative discourse entrenched in the conventions of platforming adventure games. In the majority of canonised platforming adventure games, narrative progression is teleological and linear. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 95 In Super Mario, for example, the mission-based gameplay only allows for a linear narrative progression towards Mario saving the princess, and the relationship between present and past is always clearly marked as linear. This not only holds true for mission-based platforming adventure games, but also for many open-world platforming adventure games, such as Hollow Knight (Team Cherry 2017), in which the player is free to roam the gameworld, but whenever she returns to the game’s main storyline, she is pulled back into a linearly structured narrative discourse that is teleological in nature. Rain World’s narrative discourse, through its fragmented storytelling, inac‐ cessibility, and iteration across multiple playthroughs, functions as a critical response to these generic conventions. This alienation from the conventions of the platforming adventure game operates not only through the foregrounding of nonhuman actants in its plot but also formally in the structure of Rain World’s narrative discourse. Rather than relying on a singular, cohesive narrative voice, the game’s storytelling emerges from a constellation of sources: data pearls that contain encrypted fragments of ancient communications, direct interactions with the iterators who offer cryptic philosophical musings, and entries in discussion boards that provide glimpses into the debates that different iterators have been having for decades. All written forms of discourse are also already mediated through the language of the iterators, which, as Rain World continuously reminds us, is not Slugcat’s own and has to be installed in it by fundamentally altering the way its cognition works (Figure 2). Fig. 2: The iterator Five Pebbles altering Slugcat’s brain chemistry in order to give it the ability to understand language (Videocult 2017). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 96 Xaver Boxhammer The ability to understand the written and spoken language of the iterators, which has been inherited from the ancients, is foreign to Slugcat, radically disjunct from its original constitution. As explicated above, the gameworld itself also functions as a narrative agent, with its architecture serving as a record of its history. Beyond this, the order in which information is conveyed to the player is often random because there are few hard-coded limitations to the sequence in which the gameworld is to be traversed by the player, and the game has to be replayed many times for the player to access the entire story. This engenders a mode of non-anthropocentric narrative discourse which is amplified through the player’s ability to replay the game as different Slugcat characters, each offering distinct perspectives and access to different narrative fragments, thereby turning the narrative experience itself into an iterative one. Iteration, hence, is not just a theme present in the game’s narration; it is also a fundamental process in decoding the game’s narrative. Through playing Rain World over and over again with slightly different paths and abilities, the mode of play itself mirrors the iterator’s processes of simulation. The result of this iteration is a narrative discourse that resists linear comprehension, instead requiring players to actively piece together meaning from disparate, often contradictory sources across multiple playthroughs. This, then, mirrors the archaeological nature of understanding in a post-human setting where complete narratives have been lost to time. The actual ‘story’ is continuously being obfuscated through temporal distance, iterators masking behind nicknames, and the narration of events which the player only comes to understand much later in the game. Thereby, the genre’s conventional relationship to temporality is continuously disrupted, allowing for a narrative discourse that challenges human-centric modes of narration (Caracciolo et al. 2022: 12). These narrative fragments remain fundamentally unstable and open to inter‐ pretation, as evidenced by the ongoing debates within the game’s paratextual community - fan forums, wikis, and lore videos on YouTube - where players continue to contest and negotiate competing theories about what exactly hap‐ pened in the game’s world, further pushing the game’s narrative to constitute a fluid and continuously evolving interpretive process. Rain World’s narrative resists definite comprehension in the sense that it needs to be understood as “a construction kit” (Alber 2016: 47) that players can assemble at will rather than a clearly defined plot that is easy to understand. Hence, any attempt at a summary of the gameworld’s lore will necessarily lay bare the epistemic limits of a game that never feels like it was built for the player. This makes overt the limits to understanding a nonhuman world from a human perspective. In line DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 97 2 Autotelic enactment describes a mode of interacting with media in which the narrative has to be enacted “through our own motivated actions rather than [through] being told about or shown events” (Ensslin 2015, 3). with this, autotelic, enactment (Ryan 2004: 349) 2 is a necessary precondition for the narrative to emerge, as decoding the game’s story requires immense effort. At no point during the gameplay is the player required to make sense of the story. Rain World can just as easily be played as an unnecessarily difficult platforming game with post-apocalyptic aesthetics and random cryptic musings about the nature of consciousness. In order to reach an understanding of the story, however, the player must complete the game multiple times with different Slugcat species, whose distinct stories take place at different moments in time and deliver different data pearls all over the gameworld. This makes narrative comprehension a challenge rather than a given, decentring the naturalised idea that complete mastery over the gameworld and its story is attainable. The game’s fragmented storytelling - always already mediated through technological infrastructure, from the iterators’ digital consciousness to the data pearls’ encrypted storage systems - thereby alienates players from generically entrenched linear and anthropocentric narrative modes. The technological su‐ perstructure that governs access to information about the gameworld’s lore mir‐ rors the game’s thematic preoccupation with post-human intelligences, where meaning emerges not from human intention but from machinist processes of data retrieval, environmental cycling, and systemic repetition. Hidden within the mechanical structure of replays where narrative revelations are gated behind repeated deaths and resurrections, the method of storytelling itself decentres the human in its logic - operating through patterns of iteration, accumulation, and algorithmic disclosure rather than the linear progression common to the genre. This form of technological mediation engenders a constant state of interpretive confusion, as players must navigate fragmented data streams and incomplete transmissions that resist coherent synthesis. By disrupting traditional linear narration through its reliance on technological intermediaries and cyclical revelation, Rain World’s narrative discourse therefore performs the limitations of understanding the nonhuman by rendering meaning-making dependent on multivalent nonhuman systems of information storage and retrieval. Notably, this mode of narration mirrors a shift in the human relation to contemporary technology in which emergent AI models exist as black boxes whose processes, enacted by self-attentive transformers, might be approximated but can, fundamentally, not be traced conclusively. Similarly, in Rain World’s setting, the continuous processes of iteration that the generative artificial intel‐ ligences which govern the gameworld are performing cannot be understood, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 98 Xaver Boxhammer 3 This type of emergence can be characterised as self-organising emergence in that the game’s systems produce patterns which “could not be understood, nor anticipated, through the analysis of the elements and their behaviours in isolation” (Soler-Adillon 2019). For a nuanced engagement with the multi-discursive concept, see Soler-Adillon (2019). and the narrative discourse, likewise, resists clear interpretation. The epistemic uncertainty inherent to contemporary AI systems, hence, is directly reflected in the player’s interaction with the iterators and the game’s narrative discourse. In this regard, Rain World, both in its plot and its mode of narration, highlights the changing relationship between the human and a technology that is shaping a contemporary society in which the computational processes that underlie the output of agentic AI cannot be traced anymore. This structural similarity further decentres the idea that, as humans/ players, total comprehension of the world/ gameworld is possible. Emergent systems and biocentric game design Beyond the game’s themes and its narrative discourse, Rain World is particularly interesting because of the way it makes use of emergent properties in the animation and simulation of its ecosystem to work against anthropocentric game design conventions. Emergence, in this sense, “occurs when interactions between objects in the game world or the player’s actions result in a second order of consequence that was not specifically planned by the game develop‐ ers” (Sweetser 2008: 11). This chapter argues that, rather than presenting a linear game experience that has been clearly mapped by the developers, Rain World simulates complex systems to achieve both local emergence (procedural animation, pathfinding AI) and global emergence (global ecosystem, reputation system). 3 This means that, while the systems that evoke the behaviour of non-player characters are defined by the game designers, the way in which these systems manifest specific behaviour of non-player characters is not anthropogenic. Therefore, the game’s emergent systems, again, work against the generic conventions of the platforming adventure game in which enemy behaviour is conventionally scripted in order to be predictable. Below, I explain on which levels emergence plays a role in Rain World and to what extent the different emergent properties of the game interact with one another. I argue that procedural animation and emergent creature behaviour serve to make it impossible for the actions of the nonhuman agents that populate the gameworld to be understood in easily predictable patterns, introducing a layer DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 99 of uncertainty to the game that is not usually present in platforming adventure games. All agents in the simulated gameworld are animated procedurally. This means that the way in which creatures and plants move is generated in real-time rather than being drawn frame-by-frame or replayed from pre-made animation sequences ( Jakobsson and Therrien 2016). When the player or an AI-controlled creature decides to perform an action, the game’s code calculates and produces the corresponding movement on the spot, resulting in context-specific and dynamic animations. The game benefits from a separation of the simulation of a creature’s underlying physics and the simulation of its cosmetic layer in that there is a one-way dependence between the different creatures’ simplified physics (weights and balances, gravity, flight) and the procedural animation. For instance, a creature like the Daddy Longlegs is simulated as a collection of points (representing joints) connected by virtual ‘sticks’ (limbs), with the simulation determining their positions in real time based on environmental interactions and AI decisions. The visual representation is then built on top of this structure, either by connecting these points with two-dimensional renderings or by drawing pixel art segments along the calculated paths, often using chains of interlocking images to create smooth, organic movement. This approach allows for highly expressive and context-sensitive animations: Tentacles, tails, or bodies bend, stretch, and react fluidly to obstacles, gravity, and other creatures, resulting in a dynamic aesthetic that is unpredictable due to its emergent qualities.-Elaborating on their reasoning for animating the agents of the gameworld procedurally, Jakobsson and Therrien explain: What procedural animation allows us to do is create a sense of agency and believability for all the individual creatures, because with procedural animation we can create a scenario where the AI behaviour equals the behaviour you see in the game […]. When a lizard is hunting, you can see it; you can understand its motivations, and when it can’t get directly to you, you can see it gets visibly frustrated because it's trying to, like, navigate around the environment. And that’s cool, because the player is then able to project personality into that, so you have this situation where […] the player will see a creature do something interesting that isn’t necessarily scripted behaviour and the player will infer from what’s going on that “oh, this creature is mad at me”, and that’s not really the case, but because we have all the ingredients visible, it makes this kind of, like, affect of personality for the individual creatures. (2016) To Jakobsson and Therrien, the personalities the creatures project are emergent interactions of procedural animation and player interpretation. It is these emer‐ gent properties that make embodied cognition beyond recognisably scripted DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 100 Xaver Boxhammer 4 For a more detailed description of the pathfinding algorithms, see Jakobsson and Therrien 2014. behaviour possible, but they also subvert the expectation that the player is to predict the underlying patterns that govern the aesthetic depiction of non-player characters in platforming adventure games. Beyond the aesthetic affordances of procedural animation, the locomotion AI on the creatures’ simplified physics layer, which governs where creatures put their limbs, how they orient themselves, and how they move through the world ( Jakobsson and Therrien 2016), often makes it impossible to predict how they are going to move. Contrary to many video games in which creature movement is scripted, creature movement as an emergent property makes it impossible to rehearse their next moves in order to circumvent them, because the way their movement is generated is complex and highly context dependent. While the player is able to figure out what a creature can do - the vulture can fly, the lizard can climb through pipes - and adjust Slugcat’s next actions accordingly, the player can only gauge how the AI will behave but never reliably predict a creature’s exact next move. This serves to make Rain World’s environment and the nonhuman creatures that populate it feel strange and unknowable. The locomotion AI, through this, also contributes to constructing an ecosystem that continuously points to the limits of understanding the nonhuman. This estrangement from the gameworld’s creatures is engendered not just through the creature’s distinct locomotion but also in their decision-making and pathfinding. To determine how a creature is going to path, the game’s foreground layer is conceptualised as a 2D grid system (Figure 3) and optimal pathways are designated based on a given creature’s locomotive affordances and the design of the room. 4 DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 101 Fig. 3: Screenshot from the AI debugging menu that showcases how tile-based pathfind‐ ing works in Rain World ( Jakobsson and Therrien 2014). For a given creature, the game indicates reachable tiles (blue), tiles from which the creature could not get back to its original position (red), and reachable tiles from which the creature could get back to its original position (green). All creatures also set goals and behaviours governed by their specific personality and characteristics. For example, Rain World’s most common creatures, the vibrantly coloured lizards, patrol their territory, scavenge for prey, and want to stay close to their den to seek shelter from the lethal rain and, at the same time, far away from any predator that might kill them. The different subspecies of lizard exhibit different personalities which heavily impact their decision-making. Green lizards are slow and lazy, blue lizards prefer to hang around walls and ceilings and wait for prey, and red lizards are constantly on the prowl. Lizards are more or less aggressive based on how hurt they are and some subspecies hunt in packs. While the possible actions of the different Lizard species can, through diligent observation, be approximated, it remains impossible to predict their next move to a similar degree as a player can predict the movement of a non-player character in a Super Mario game, where enemy behaviour is scripted by game designers in order to be predictable. Conversely, the nonhuman agents in Rain World resist pattern recognition and DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 102 Xaver Boxhammer remain unpredictable. This, again, points to the limits of human cognition in that it highlights the fundamental unknowability of the processes that govern nonhuman agents, rejecting the tendency towards anthropomorphising the behaviour of nonhuman entities present in canonised platforming adventure games. Creature behaviour is further complicated by Rain World’s reputation system, which impacts the behaviour different creatures exhibit towards each other and the player. Different actions, such as attacking, killing, stealing, or helping creatures, dynamically influence the player’s reputation with a given group of creatures in a given region (Figure 4). Killing a creature or stealing from them will lower your reputation, causing them to become hostile or fearful, while trading with them or assisting them in combat will improve your reputation, making them more likely to be friendly or allow you to pass through their ter‐ ritories unchallenged. This system is nuanced: reputation is tracked on several levels (regional, global, filtered local, and all reputation), and different creatures react to different reputation thresholds. Reputation is almost always invisible to the player, though it can be gauged by carefully observing creature behaviour. The game’s reputation system effectively decentres the player-character, as the player’s acts, while involved in shaping the ecosystem in accordance with their actions, is by no means the only influence on the gameworld’s creatures. Reputation exists and evolves independently of the player’s acts; different species will fight each other and change their reputation towards each other off-screen, and the habitat of different creatures will continuously shift without any interaction with the player. In conventional platforming adventure games, the behaviour of non-player creatures revolves fully around the acts of the player; they will die only when the player kills them and respawn only when the player acts a specific way. Rain World rejects this mode of player-centric game design by creating an ecosystem in which the player-character only plays a small part. Through this, the game challenges anthropocentric game design conventions, making the ecosystem appear like its own nonhuman, never fully knowable, actant. Fig. 4: Base game reputation table from Rain World’s DevTools (Videocult 2017) DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 103 Beyond emergent behaviour on a local level, Rain World continuously simulates interactions globally, i.e., between all creatures across all 1600 screens of the game, whether the player is in them or not. The game designers refer to this as the “abstract creature framework” ( Jakobsson and Therrien 2016). Complex ecological interactions, territorial disputes, hunting behaviours, and changes in social relationships between species unfold regardless of the player’s presence or awareness. This design choice generates emergent non-anthropo‐ genic micro-narratives ( Jenkins 2004) that can profoundly impact gameplay; a befriended scavenger might eliminate a threat the player could never overcome, entirely outside the player’s observation or control, and the player will stumble over this change without knowing what caused it. Rather than positioning the player-character as the central organising principle around which the gameworld revolves, the abstract creature framework relegates the player to the role of a minor participant within a vast, indifferent ecosystem. This systemic decentring, then, challenges the anthropocentric game design conventions that typically structure virtual environments in digital games, as players must confront the reality that no single agent can comprehend this gameworld and that mere survival in any ecosystem in which you are primarily prey is an achievement. Rain World’s simulation of a complex ecosystem, in its procedural animation, emergent creature behaviour, and reputation system, is indifferent to the player, as it does not centre the player-character. Emergence plays a vital role in destabilising the primacy of the human in favour of a nonhuman-centric approach to game design, precisely because no human made a direct game design choice in order for specific behaviours to emerge. In line with this, Gislam argues that “the use of procedural content generation algorithms [acts] as a non-human co-constructor of game space alongside the player” (2024: 29 f.). While Rain World’s space is not generated procedurally, the nonhuman systems that the game engenders through the procedural simulation of indifferent ecosystems come to define the game’s spaces and show that Gislam’s argument can be expanded beyond the category of game space to the realm of the game’s simulated ecosystem. Procedural generation and emergent behaviours make players confront the nonhuman by alienating them from a generically conditioned understanding of how nonhuman actants are supposed to look and behave. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 104 Xaver Boxhammer Conclusion Rain World, in its aesthetics, story, narrative discourse, and mechanics, presents a provoking engagement with the nonhuman through a decentring of anthro‐ pocentric modes of play. By distributing a fragmented story about nonhuman consciousness across multiple nonhuman agents, the game creates an unstable, technologically mediated narrative mode that resists linear comprehension and thereby mirrors the procedural arguments the game makes about entrenched game design conventions. Once players realise that they are only a minor participant in vast systemic processes that operate independently of human presence or control and are fundamentally unknowable to them, their sense of agency comes under scrutiny, ultimately resulting in an experience in which they can never exert full mastery over the gameworld, highlighting the limitations of human knowledge about nonhuman systems, be they animal or machinic. Yet, despite its intention to depart from anthropocentric game design, Rain World retains some conventional elements that anchor the experience in familiar narrative and ludic frameworks. Slugcat’s deliberate cuteness ( Jakobsson and Therrien 2016), which arguably played a significant role in funding the game in the first place, appeals to a distinct “popular aesthetics of video games” (Lukman 2023: 209). This encourages player identification and emotional investment in ways that popular video games employ, and the narrative of Slugcat’s ultimate trajectory toward ascension, which implies transcendence of consciousness and spiritual development, alongside alternative endings that suggest homecoming and reunion, reveals a loose adherence to classical narrative arcs of growth, transformation, reunion, and resolution. To what degree this means that the game ultimately fails at non-anthropocentric game design is up for debate. Either way, this tension between experimental game design and anthropocentric elements generates a productive ambiguity which illuminates the enmeshment between familiar and strange modes of meaning-making within contemporary digital media. 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Game Studies 19/ 2, https: / / gamestudies.org/ 1902/ artic les/ soleradillon. Sweetser, Penelope. 2008. “Emergence in Games”. Game Connect Asia Pacific 2008, 1-50. Tyler, Tom. 2022. Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Valeriano, Brandon/ Habel, Philip. 2016. “Who are the Enemies? The Visual Framing of Enemies in Digital Games”.-International Studies Review-18/ 3, 462-486. Videocult. 2017. Rain World. Adult Swim Games. Windows Version. Woolbright, Lauren. 2017. “Game Design as Climate Change Activism”. Ecozon@: Euro‐ pean Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 8, 88-102. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0005 Rain World and Anti-Anthropocentric Game Design in the Post-Apocalypse 107 Gender and the Nonhuman Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own Paul Fagan Introduction Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable nonhuman turn in Virginia Woolf studies. Whereas twentieth-century criticism primarily emphasised Woolf ’s modernist representations of human interiority, contemporary studies increas‐ ingly foreground the significance of more-than-human life to her aesthetic project. Drawing on ecocritical and new materialist frameworks, critics now explore not only the care with which Woolf situates her human subjects in their environments, but also how the aliveness and vulnerability of animals, plants, and climate in her work speak to twenty-first-century concerns about anthropogenic climate change. In particular, Woolf ’s modernist short stories and novels resonate with current debates through their representations of nonhuman perspectives. Her early short fiction depicts human characters imagining the embodied subjectivity of a tree in “The Mark on the Wall” (1917) and the experiential world of a snail in “Kew Gardens” (1919), while the cocker spaniel who narratively focalises her novel Flush (1933) and the alterity of the canine gaze in “Gipsy, the Mongrel” (1940) exemplify Woolf ’s sustained engagement with animal consciousness. This heightened critical awareness of the Woolfian mode of contemplating “the human interrelationship with the non-human through subtle shifts of perspective” (Walker 2002: 177) has placed her work at the centre of modernist nonhuman studies. A distinct strand within the nonhuman turn in Woolf studies examines her status as an ecofeminist writer. Indeed, in three of the given examples, it is a woman who regards nonhuman life with curiosity and empathy, while Flush is often read as a dog’s-eye view on “women’s conditioning under patriarchy” (Scott 2012: 172). The turn of the twenty-first century saw a series of articles that debated Woolf ’s place in an ecofeminist critical project that identifies ideological and material links between the patriarchal subordinations of ‘nature’ and of ‘woman-as-nature’. Although these critics emphasise Woolf ’s representations of DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 “other-than-human […] subjectivities” (Swanson 2011: 33) and acknowledge her feminist commitments, they caution that she is writing in a “proto-ecofeminist” (Scott 2007: 108) mode “long before such a perspective was properly theorised” (Walker 2002: 182). Bonnie Kime Scott encapsulates this position with her contention that “[e]ven if we concede that Woolf ’s uses of nature […] have tremendous appeal to feminists attuned to the environment, we cannot and should not claim current ecofeminist perspectives as hers” (2011: 2). From this critical perspective, representations of nonhuman subjectivity in Woolf ’s anti-patriarchal fiction are understood as testing grounds for contemporary ecofeminist thought without fully belonging to that project. In the present essay, I want to recalibrate this conversation by situating Woolf within a revised chronology of ecofeminist essay writing. This longer-view history encompasses three interrelated historical, theoretical, and literary move‐ ments: first-wave anti-vivisection feminism (c. 1860s-1920s), which promotes transspecies feeling and political alliance between women and animals as fellow victims of patriarchy; second-wave ecofeminism (c. 1970s-1990s), which conceives women’s association with nature and animality to be “a major tool in their oppression” (Plumwood 1993: 47); third-wave planetary feminism (2000s-present), which explores the interconnection between global systems of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and environmental destruction and imagines futures beyond the limits of nation, class, gender or species. Despite Carol J. Adams’s identification of a “historic alliance of feminism and vegetarianism” in nineteenth-century “antivivisection activism […] and suffrage movements” (1990: 167), anti-vivisectionist feminism is often sidelined in histories that locate ecofeminism’s theoretical emergence in Françoise d’Eaubonne’s coining of the term in 1974. This is the conceptualisation of ecofeminism’s genealogy that critics tend to apply when assessing Woolf ’s alignment with the project. While this scholarship has produced important, meaningful insights, this framing has meant that Woolf ’s response to first-wave anti-vivisectionist feminism has not been fully evaluated. I contend that reintegrating this earlier ecofeminist mode into this history is critical to understanding the activist and literary articulation of gendered and nonhuman entanglements across modern Western feminist movements. More specifically, I argue that such a reframing is crucial to clarifying Woolf ’s position within that tradition as not only a modernist pioneer, speaking towards future theoretical debates, but also as a writer working within, and responding to, an established tradition of first-wave ecofeminist essay writing. To narrow my focus in relation to this expansive theme, my intervention reconsiders the ecofeminist dimensions of a series of nonfiction pieces that DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 112 Paul Fagan Woolf composed across the first three decades of her career, and culminates in a new ecofeminist reading of A Room of One’s Own (1929). With a handful of notable exceptions (Goldman 2007; Yang 2014; Bregović 2019; Adkins 2022), Woolf ’s influential extended feminist lecture-essay has been largely sidelined in the recent re-evaluation of her work from nonhuman studies and ecofeminist perspectives. The marginal role of A Room of One’s Own in this critical project might be explained by its apparently human-centred socio-economic thesis that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (1929: 6). However, I hold that an exclusive focus on this argument for women’s financial independence and creative autonomy obscures the ways in which Woolf ’s thesis, as it is developed across the piece, is not only feminist but distinctly ecofeminist in its key concerns and movements of thought. This reading turns upon an interpretation of nonhuman perspectives in Woolf's essay as ruptures that productively resituate her considerations of women’s socio-economic oppression within the more-than-human world. My wager is that this dimension of the essay’s argument is rendered more legible when we understand Woolf ’s essay not so much as a precursor to but a turn in the ecofeminist essay tradition. My argument proceeds in three interconnected movements. First, I outline my understanding of the three waves of modern ecofeminist thought that structure the diverse historical and theoretical perspectives which inform my analysis of A Room of One’s Own. To integrate the development of Woolf’s ecofeminist aesthetic into this broader history, I here foreground the early essays “On a Faithful Friend” (1905), “The Plumage Bill” (1920), and “Thunder at Wembley” (1924), as well as her New Statesman letters to Arnold Bennett (1920). The next two sections develop my position that each of these early essays anticipates the three different ecofeminist perspectives that are interwoven throughout A Room of One’s Own. Having established the various ways in which the feminist and nonhuman threads of A Room of One’s Own entangle and inform each other and traced the essay’s continuities and discontinuities with firstand second-wave ecofeminisms, I finally spotlight a series of moments in which the introduction of nonhuman perspectives - from the embodied subjectivity of a Manx cat to the imagined viewpoint of an extra-terrestrial alien - grants Woolf ’s narrator a queer, planetary and even apocalyptic vantage point on the gendered writing traditions she is tracing. In conclusion, I reflect on how this different historization of Woolf ’s essay might allow us to see more clearly the significance of her writing to ecofeminist thought and vice versa. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own 113 Woolf’s early essays and the three waves of ecofeminism Many Victorian and Edwardian essayists were animated by an activist commit‐ ment to the interconnected struggles for animal and women’s rights. These first-wave feminist writers promoted identification and solidarity with vivisec‐ ted animals as fellow victims of patriarchal biopolitical control, albeit often with a speciesist privileging of canine suffering (Lansbury 1985; Hamilton 1992). This trend is exemplified by Frances Power Cobbe, the anti-vivisection movement’s leading figure, whose periodical essays repeatedly linked the patriarchal abuse of wives and animals (O’Connor 2010: 31-58). Frédéric Regard (2024) has recently argued that scholarship on Flush’s canine perspective has neglected Cobbe’s example. I agree that Cobbe is an enlightening foil for Woolf’s literary renderings of nonhuman perspectives, but want to draw out how this comparison might also revise our understanding of Woolf ’s position in the history of ecofeminist writing. One of Woolf’s earliest non-fiction pieces, “On a Faithful Friend” published in the Guardian church paper in 1905 (nine months after Cobbe’s death), explores the human-canine bond through a tribute to her family’s “dear and faithful friend” Shag, “a sociable dog” who “cherished the utmost loyalty for his person” (1986: 12). Nao Hirai notes that “Shag’s miraculous return home before his death” informs the conclusion of Flush, in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dying spaniel “runs through the Italian city to his mistress” (2024: 23). In her pioneering study of species-barrier crossings in Woolf ’s writing, Scott notes that this trope of the ailing dog’s miraculous return to their owner has its origins in “Victorian stories of canine loyalty” (2012: 167). Although Woolf ’s dogs share their Victorian counterparts’ capacity for loyalty and love toward their human companions, Scott insists that her writing goes “beyond the Victorian model” by attributing mindfulness to animals through direct representations of “their thoughts” (158). On this basis, Scott claims that “Woolf ’s introduction of feeling as a criterion” of commonality “anticipates the arguments of ecofeminist ethicists” grounded in sympathetic attention to animal suffering (190). This chronology, however, does not reflect the actual substance of Victorian animal welfare and anti-vivisection literature; in particular, Cobbe’s conviction that “animal ethics needed to start from feelings” (Regard 2024; original emphasis). In essays such as “The Consciousness of Dogs” (1872), Cobbe asserts dogs’ emotional interiority and reasoning power; a stance figured in Confessions of a Lost Dog (1867), which Cobbe writes from a first-person canine perspective to impart to readers that humans and dogs share “transspecies feelings” of “love, loyalty, sympathy” (Hamilton 1992: 85). While Woolf ’s essay writing (and its influence upon her fiction) does diverge in significant respects from anti-vivi‐ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 114 Paul Fagan section feminism, her emphasis on canine interiority, feeling, and capacity to suffer constitutes, in fact, a substantive continuity with that movement. This debt is further extended and complicated in Woolf’s forceful rebuttal to H. W. Massingham’s Nation commentary on the failure of the 1920 Plumage Bill, which had been intended to restrict the importation of plumage into the UK. Writing under the pseudonym “Wayfarer”, Massingham deflects responsibility for avian suffering onto female consumers: “But what do women care? ”, he asks, directing readers to observe the feathered hats adorning Regent Street (qtd. in Woolf 1995: 287). In her rejoinder, published in the Woman’s Leader, Woolf invites her readers to imagine another perspective, not of “Wayfarer” judging the women of Regent Street, but of “a blazing South American landscape” in which “millions of birds […] are doomed not only to extinction but to torture”. Transspecies sympathy is encouraged through Woolf ’s insistence that “if we wish to go on making pictures, we must imagine innumerable mouths opening and shutting, opening and shutting, until - as no parent bird comes to feed them - the young birds rot where they sit” (1995: 288). With this affective image planted in her reader’s mind, Woolf zooms out to reveal the real perpetrators: the birds “are killed by men, starved by men, and tortured by men”, while the House of Commons committee that voted down the bill are, with one exception, all men - “but what”, she asks sarcastically, “do men care? ” (1995: 288 f.). In identifying colonial, legal and patriarchal institutions as the agents of avian torture, and in expressing “sincere anger at [Wayfarer’s] gender-biased anti-plumage argument” (Abbott 1995: 264), Woolf aligns herself with the affec‐ tive rhetorical strategies and feminist orientation of Victorian anti-vivisectionist essayists, who endeavoured to mobilise public opinion through graphic and distressing depictions of torturous experiments on animals at the hands of male scientific authority. Cobbe’s satire The Age of Science (1877) offers a particularly gruesome example when a physiologist slowly drowns the family’s devoted Newfoundland dog in a tub out of “scientific interest” and as an “instructive and entertaining spectacle” for his six-year-old son (Cobbe 1877: 18). Transspecies sympathy is evoked in the dying dog’s vain attempts “to lick the boy’s face” (Cobbe 1877: 18). The episode forms part of Cobbe’s broader vision of a dystopian society ruled purely through the values of patriarchal science, which excludes women from education and enacts mass animal slaughter through excessive vivisection, culminating in an apocalyptic extinction event. Cobbe’s ecofeminist satire makes clear that these oppressions of women and animals are not allegorical of each other but discursively and materially inextricable from each other (Fagan 2023). In its use of affective rhetorical strategies to rouse transspecies sympathy for canine suffering, the scene exemplifies the aesthetic DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own 115 1 In a recent article, Saskia McCracken argues the inverse position of Abbott’s; namely, that in “The Plumage Bill” Woolf is “proto-posthumanist in her celebration of bird-woman affinities” (2022). While I have much sympathy with McCracken’s reading, I find its contention that Woolf, by “defending women and birds together, […] moves towards an ‘affirmative’ posthumanism” (2022) similarly neglects the influence of anti-vivisection feminist writing on the piece’s rhetorical and conceptual framework. and ideological influences that underlie Woolf ’s graphic and confrontational representation of avian suffering at the hands of men in “The Plumage Bill”. Simultaneously, Cobbe provides a critical coordinate against which to meas‐ ure Woolf’s divergence from her anti-vivisection feminist precursors. Beyond the rhetorical and substantive continuities between Woolf ’s essay and earlier anti-vivisectionist feminist writing, “The Plumage Bill” concludes on a self-re‐ flective note that departs from Cobbe’s more strident model: So far as I know, the above, though much embittered by sex antagonism, is a perfectly true statement. But the interesting point is that in my ardour to confute “Wayfarer”, a journalist of admitted humanity, I have said more about his injustice to women than about the suffering of birds. Can it be that it is a graver sin to be unjust to women than to torture birds? (1995: 289) In this final turn in her argument, Woolf interrogates her own situated and emotional investment in the subject of women’s and animals’ interrelated oppressions. Reginald Abbott contends that “The Plumage Bill” “cannot be said to fit [Carol J.] Adams’s […] feminist-animal rights” history, since the polemical essay “clearly distinguishes the two concerns as separate, with the woman question the more important of the two”, thereby introducing “discontinuity” with the earlier movement (1995: 265). However, to my thinking, the essay’s im‐ plicit conversation with the rhetorical ideology of anti-vivisectionist feminism suggests not a rupture but a transformation. Even as Woolf attempts to balance her anti-plumage position with controlled outrage at Massingham’s misogyny, she observes that avian extinction caused by colonial patriarchal exploitation can be mobilised against women when rhetorically displaced onto accusations of feminine vanity. Woolf thus identifies a structural vulnerability within earlier feminist-animal rights discourse. Her intervention does not abandon that movement’s ethical commitments, but it does perceive a need to reconfigure its terms in response to the ways its arguments might be appropriated to reinforce misogyny. 1 Woolf’s reflections across “The Plumage Bill” orient her thinking toward a position that would later become a central focus of second-wave ecofeminism. In contrast to anti-vivisection feminism’s focus on women’s shared consciousness DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 116 Paul Fagan and plight with nonhuman animals, second-wave ecofeminism spotlights how women’s inclusion in the spheres of nature and animality under patriarchy fa‐ cilitates their construction as “a lesser form of humanity lacking the full measure of rationality or culture” (Plumwood 1993: 4). Thus Western philosophical and literary traditions are understood to be both anthropocentric and androcentric in their recurrent articulation of ‘rational civilisation’ not only with ‘the human’ but more specifically with ‘the human male’. Woolf most directly engages this position in her critiques of nineteenth and early twentieth-century sexological discourse, which “barred women from intellectual achievement” through “binary divisions that assigned mind, intellect, and soul to men while confining women to body and matter” (Moran 2001: 486). Woolf expresses this critique a few months after the publication of “The Plumage Bill” in two letters published in the New Statesman responding to Desmond MacCarthy’s effusive review of Arnold Bennett’s sexological study Our Women (1920). Writing under the pseudonym “Affable Hawk”, MacCarthy praises Bennett’s book for proving that “women are inferior to men in intellectual [and creative] power” (1920: 704). Woolf ’s retort to Bennett and MacCarthy’s sexological claims for women’s intellectual inferiority lays out the core argument that would be more fully developed and complicated in A Room of One’s Own: women’s access to intellectual and creative life had been fettered by material, financial, educational, and legal constraints, rather than essentialist or biological limitations. Woolf ’s intervention thus targets the anthropocentric misogyny im‐ plicit in the hierarchical binaries of man/ mind/ reason/ civilisation and woman/ body/ emotion/ nature that structure sexological thought. Provoked by their exchange, MacCarthy reinforced this dynamic by diminishing Woolf ’s literary achievements throughout the 1920s in terms which relegated her work to the realm of animality: he dismissed Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as “a long wool-gathering process” (1931: 182), and in September 1928 - one month before her lectures at Newnham and Girton that would form the basis of A Room of One’s Own - he chastised the talk’s “butterfly lightness” (Woolf 1980: 197) in “a gendered dismissal of Woolf ’s overly ‘feminine’ style” (Moran 2001: 482). Resituated within this broader intellectual context, the rhetorical strategies of “The Plumage Bill” and her New Statesman letters position Woolf at the nexus of two ecofeminist trajectories: on the one hand, anti-vivisectionist feminism’s appeal to transspecies sympathy and human-nonhuman alliance; on the other, second-wave ecofeminism’s interrogation of the ideological association between women and animality as a mechanism of patriarchal domination and exclusion from intellectual life. As Val Plumwood writes in her influential second-wave ecofeminist work Feminism and the Mastery of DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own 117 Nature (1993), this discursive formation forces women into “an unacceptable choice within patriarchy”: either to repudiate their association with “nature” - thereby endorsing the anthropocentric humanism that legitimises violence against nonhuman life - or to embrace the association, thereby affirming androcentric presuppositions that deny them full access to the discursive category of “the human” (36). My position is that in seeking to short-circuit this unacceptable choice for women writers, Woolf develops a modernist ecofeminist mode of writing that is comparable in certain key aspects to twenty-first-century “planetary feminism” (Neimanis 2016), which deconstructs the human-male/ nonhuman-female binary from a new materialist and posthuman perspective. Astrida Neimanis’ theory of hydrofeminism exemplifies this movement’s recog‐ nition that human bodies, of any sex or gender, are transcorporeally continuous with the nonhuman networks and vitalistic assemblages of planetary life. Hydrofeminism simultaneously reclaims the association of femininity with nature (specifically, water) and rejects the patriarchal binary of the ‘dry’ male intellect and ‘leaky’ female body on the biocentric grounds that all human bodies, considered androgynously, are “bodies of water connected to, coming from, and flowing into other more-than-human bodies of water” (Neimanis 2020). Thus, from a planetary feminist perspective, humans are “locked in an inescapable relation of interbeing” with and through “other multitudinous bodies” (Neimanis 2009: 90) in ways that belie Enlightenment delimitations not only of the autonomous human subject but also of sexual difference. The 1924 essay “Thunder at Wembley”, published in The Nation and the Athe‐ naeum, demonstrates Woolf’s development of an aesthetic that both attempts to think beyond the ecofeminist limitations laid out in her previous pieces and anticipates certain aspects of twenty-first-century planetary feminism. Her commentary on the 1924 British-Empire Exhibition at Wembley opens with the declaration that “nature” is the exhibition’s “ruin”, despite the efforts of the Lords, Lieutenant Generals, and Dukes “to keep her out” (1988: 410 f.; emphasis added). Recounting the official ceremony’s disruption by a storm, Woolf speculates that these authorities “might have eradicated the grass and felled the chestnut trees; even so the thrushes would have got in, and there would always have been the sky” (411). Thus, patriarchal institutions are shown to exhibit an abject eco-horror at an agentic, feminised “nature”, which it strives but fails to master. The wind intensifies into “water-spouts of cloud” that disturb the exhibition and obscure the marching “Massed Bands of Empire”, who are depicted also in nonhuman form as “[m]en like pincushions, men like pouter pigeons, men like pillar-boxes” (413). In this figurative collapse of DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 118 Paul Fagan human exceptionalism, Woolf, like Neimanis after her, zoomorphically asserts the continuity of not only women but also men with nonhuman life. This transgression of the categorical limits of the human moves Woolf’s imagination towards a more radically apocalyptic vision than that articulated in her previous writings on ecofeminist themes, which had relied more heavily on rational argumentation and affective rhetoric. By the essay’s conclusion, the “livid” feminine sky “is in violent commotion”, signifying that “some appalling catastrophe is impending” : Pagodas are dissolving in dust. […] Colonies are perishing and dispersing in spray of inconceivable beauty and terror […]. Humanity is rushing to destruction […]. Cracks like the white roots of trees spread themselves across the firmament. The Empire is perishing […]; the Exhibition is in ruins, for that is what comes of letting in the sky. (413) The closing image of “Thunder at Wembley” thus renders the threat posed by an embodied, vitalist, and agentic feminine nature to the patriarchal institutions of masculinist empire through explicitly apocalyptic imagery and a rhetoric of revelation. While Woolf’s essay predates planetary feminism by many decades, I contend that such resonances that do exist are grounded in Woolf ’s modernist interest in apocalyptic imagery and temporal aesthetics, which many authors of the period used to incorporate an awareness of both pre-human and post-human time into their works (cf. Kermode 2000; Borg 2019). Indeed, planetary feminism echoes the mid-twentieth-century literary critic Northrop Frye’s definition of “apocalypse” as “the complete transformation of both nature and human nature into the same form” (1961: 8) and his conceptualisation of apocalyptic revelation as “the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body” (1957: 119). In “Thunder at Wembley” (1924), Woolf ’s nonhuman imaginary resonates with planetary feminism in its depiction of an apocalyptic environmental event that pierces the veils of both anthropocentrism and androcentrism. Crucially for my argument, the disruptive act “of letting in the sky” in “Thunder at Wembley” anticipates the motif of the “unveiled sky” in A Room of One’s Own. In that later essay, while advancing her case for women’s economic independence, Woolf’s narrator reveals that her “aunt’s legacy” of 500 pounds “unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, […] a view of the open sky” (1929: 59). The apocalyptic rhetoric of unveiling the sky (apokalypsis, meaning ‘unveiling’ or ‘revelation’) connotes a moment of rupture and disclosure. The unveiled sky signifies not merely financial autonomy but a transformative reconfiguration DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own 119 2 Girton College was founded in 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon; Newnham College in 1871 by a group organising Lectures for Ladies, including Henry Sidgwick and Millicent Garrett Fawcett. that destabilises entrenched binaries: human and nonhuman, masculine and feminine, authority and subordination. This connection prompts my following consideration of A Room of One’s Own as a culmination of the ecofeminist rhetorics, positions and perspectives Woolf had been developing across her early non-fiction, synthesising them into a more expansive vision of epistemic and imaginative liberation. A Room of One’s Own between first and second wave ecofeminism A Room of One’s Own originated in two October-1928 lectures Woolf delivered to student societies at women’s colleges at Cambridge University: the Arts Society at Newnham College and the ODTAA (One Damned Thing After Another) Society at Girton College. The published essay is constructed as a narrative of Woolf ’s shifting reflections on the subject she has been invited to address, “Women and Fiction” (1929: 5), framed by direct appeals to the female students of Girton and Newnham. Within this hybrid narrative structure, her partly-fictionalised, unnamed narrator visits the partly-fictionalised men’s (Oxbridge) and women’s (Fernham) colleges of Cambridge, before conducting research in the British Museum to understand the material and financial inequalities she has witnessed between them. The sites of Woolf ’s lectures at Girton and Newnham place A Room of One’s Own in implicit conversation with the legacy of first-wave feminism, as both colleges were established during the 1860s-70s campaign for women’s higher education reform. 2 Woolf thus delivers her remarks in women-only spaces which had been primary sites of early ecofeminist lecturing and debate. For instance, the prominent animaland women’s-rights campaigner Anna Kingsford delivered “A Lecture on Food” to the students of Girton College in April 1882, advocating vegetarianism on bio‐ logical, economical, ethical, and aesthetic grounds (1882: 77-100). Concurrently, anti-vivisectionist periodicals such as The Zoophilist - the official magazine of the National Anti-Vivisection Society, founded by Cobbe in 1875 - regularly debated the danger that the physiological lessons at Girton would turn its students into “female vivisectors” (Hamilton 1991: 32). As such, Woolf ’s lectures are set in a central material and discursive site of first-wave ecofeminism. Within this context, Cobbe constitutes an unspoken presence in Woolf’s essay. She appears in the oblique figure of the Fernham lecturer Mary Seton’s DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 120 Paul Fagan mother, photographed “encouraging a spaniel to look at the camera, with the amused, yet strained expression of one who is sure that the dog will move directly the bulb is pressed” (1929: 32). The image evokes the photograph of Hajjin, Cobbe’s companion dog with her life partner Mary Lloyd, featured on the 1867 cover of Confessions of a Lost Dog. The broader generation of Victorian anti-vivisectionist feminists that Cobbe represents is likely in Woolf ’s narrator’s mind when she asks “whether or not the blame” for Fernham’s poor financial situation “rested on the old lady who was looking at the spaniel” rather than developing a financial basis for women’s independence (1929: 35). This critique of the foremother “encouraging a spaniel to look at the camera” registers Woolf ’s evaluation of the limited social-activist aims of nineteenth-century ecofeminist writers; yet, it is also complicated and ironized by the fact that four years later, the first edition of Flush featured two photographs of Woolf ’s own dog, Pinka (a gift from her lover Vita Sackville-West), on the cover and as frontispiece. This re-situation of A Room of One’s Own as both an extension of and a response to anti-vivisection feminism also reveals the persistence of certain limitations. Woolf ’s emphasis on financial security, higher education, and literary genius as markers of women’s fuller humanity risks reproducing many of first-wave feminism’s class-bound assumptions, while the essay’s exclusively white literary genealogy of women writers reflects a persistently narrow racial framework. Altogether, a fuller reckoning with these continuities and discontinuities productively nuances our reading of A Room of One’s Own, foregrounding both its transformative ambitions and its historical constraints. Woolf’s anticipation of a second-wave ecofeminist perspective emerges most forcefully in the British Museum section of A Room of One’s Own. Her approach strikingly resembles that of Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, which documents an astonishing catalogue of quotations from male philoso‐ phers, historians, scientists, and writers who define “woman” in animalistic terms (1993: 47). In her research, Woolf ’s narrator likewise uncovers a long history of male writers who deny to women the ability to think rationally or creatively through pejorative comparison with domestic animals. She cites Nick Greene’s assertion “that a woman acting put him in mind of a dog dancing” and traces the durability of this trope throughout the centuries, from Samuel Johnson’s proclamation that “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs” (in so far as it “is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all”) to a 1928 book on music which applies Johnson’s dictum to “a woman’s composing” (1929: 82 f.). She further cites a bishop’s declaration that it is as impossible for cats to “go to heaven” as “for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare” (69 f.). The narrator DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own 121 concedes the bishop’s claim but transvalues its essentialist presuppositions into a materialist analysis through a speculative history of Shakespeare’s sister who, despite possessing a passion and genius equivalent to her brother’s, is denied a theatrical career by a stage manager “bellow[ing] something about poodles dancing and women acting” (72). By foregrounding the recurrent woman-as-dog trope, Woolf complicates earlier feminist invocations of woman-canine affinity: if such associations have enabled ethical solidarities, the narrator’s research suggests, they have also furnished a vocabulary for women’s dehumanisation and exclusion. The combined force of anthropocentric and androcentric authority is con‐ densed in the narrator’s imagination into the composite figure Professor von X, “writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex” while angrily “jab[bing] his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect […], but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it” (1929: 46 f.). This image of the interconnected patriarchal aggressions towards the animal and woman-as-an‐ imal is rendered explicit in the narrator’s description of the colonising male “instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce chien est à moi [this dog is mine]” (76). As Jane Goldman observes, Woolf’s citation of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées (1670) mobilises a racist and misogynistic lexicon in which colonial subjects and women are figured as servile dogs. Yet, Goldman notes that the image also destabilises gendered dualisms in so far as the men marking territory and asserting ownership are also rendered canine, so that the “double-gendered dog is both subject and object of colonialism” (2007: 67). Significantly, this polysemantic ‘slave-woman-dog’ image occurs in a passage about gendered modes of writing, in which the male writer’s colonising pen is contrasted with the woman writer’s self-veiling anonymity. This reflection folds back onto Woolf herself as the essay’s author, who characterises her assignment to lecture on “women and fiction” as a “collar” that “bowed [her] head to the ground” (1929: 8). In this regard, Woolf speaks from a similarly doubled position, as both the servile canine object constructed by patriarchal discourse and as the woman-dog subject speaking to the limited beneficiaries of partial first-wave feminist reform. Following the museum sequence, A Room of One’s Own explores how these mutually reinforcing anthropocentric and androcentric discourses shape men’s and women’s writing differently. Reading a contemporary novel by a male author, Woolf’s narrator perceives “a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I’” that obscures the world behind it, rendering other nonhuman and less-than-human figures “shapeless as mist”: “Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 122 Paul Fagan But…she has not a bone in her body” (150). Based on the male author’s disinterest in the indistinguishable figures of women or landscapes, the narrator determines that “[n]othing will grow” in his obscuring shadow (151). These observations are balanced by Woolf ’s contention that women’s warranted anger at their dehumanisation and marginalisation is limiting their ability to write truthfully about life. She laments that Lady Winchilsea, “whose mind was tuned to nature and reflection”, was driven to “anger and bitterness”, so that her “gift is all grown about with weeds and bound with briars” (91). The theme continues her own self-interrogation at the conclusion of “The Plumage Bill” that her intervention in ‘the woman question’ might be - or might be perceived as - “embittered by sex antagonism” (1995: 289). Female resentment, Woolf suggests, even when justified, subverts the writer’s ability to represent life as surely as masculine anger or egotism, as she charges that the characteristic twentieth-century woman writer “remembers that women’s writing has been called flowery and so provides a superfluity of thorns” (1929: 121). A Room of One’s Own attempts to transcend gendered anger through a mode of intellectual and artistic detachment hinged on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s maxim that “a great mind is androgynous” (148). In this regard, Woolf’s argument offers a variation on Cobbe’s political and economic advocacy of celibacy for women writers on the basis that “anything good, or noble, […] must be done disinterestedly” (2010: 41). Yet, linking Woolf ’s promotion of an androgynous perspective exclusively to the essay’s material argument risks narrowing the scope of her project. Her account of androgynous objectivity entails not only social and economic reform but also a reorientation of perspective, which, I argue, is gained through a deeper engagement with nonhuman subjectivities and agencies. For if the explicit purpose of A Room of One’s Own is to gain a vantage point from which to see the obscured woman in her fuller complexity, a closer reading reveals that it is equally invested in gaining an unalienated, proto-planetary feminist perspective on the obscured landscape, as evidenced in its diverse close-ups on plant (lilacs, crocuses, tulips, daffodils, bluebells, roses, carnations, plum trees, grass, cucumbers, prunes) and animal life (cats, dogs, horses, elephants, butterflies, spiders, worms), and its zoom-outs on the Earth’s climate (breezes, clouds, pollen, dust, atmosphere) and the universe beyond (the sky and the stars). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own 123 Nonhuman, apocalyptic and planetary perspectives in A Room of One’s Own The embedded narrative of A Room of One’s Own opens with Woolf’s lecturer on the grounds of Oxbridge “lost in thought” on the banks of a river that “reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree” (1929: 8). Woolf thus situates her protagonist in a liminal setting: quasi-real in its indexical relation to the male colleges of Cambridge and Oxford, but also quasi-mythical in its patriarchal biblical allusions to bushes that “seemed burnt with the heat” and apocalyptic imagery of the “burning tree”, a symbol of destruction and revival. Like that of “Thunder at Wembley”, the environment is at once agentic, anthropomorphised and feminised in its imagery of willows that “wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders” (8). In this figuratively reflective, ecofeminist setting, the narrator’s “[t]hought […] had let its line down into the stream” until she feels the tug “of an idea at the end of [her] line” (1929: 8). The immediate analogy of ideas to the abstracted figure of the fish, and of thinking to angling, is anthropocentrically metaphor‐ ical. However, it is crucial to recognise this imagery as a variation on the essay’s central motif of “the stream” as the flow of life beyond human perspective and history, of which, Woolf suggests, the dispassionately androgynous artist may gain occasional glimpses. Indeed, the essay’s famed thesis is offered as a means to this end, as Woolf tells her women readers: “I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough […] to contemplate the future or the past of the world […] and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream” (164). From the outset, then, the essay resonates with the planetary perspective of Neimanis’ hydrofeminism, encouraging women writers to transcend their gendered role in human society by accessing their connections with more-than-human bodies of water. Woolf’s biblical allusion to the burning bush in this opening scene is ironized when the narrator’s reflection is interrupted by the voice of the university Beadle who, with an expression of “horror and indignation”, comes to remove her: “he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here” (9). The Beadle’s injunction ironically echoes Exodus 3: 5, in which God’s voice calls out to Moses from the burning bush and commands him to “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (NRSVA). The effect of this interruption is twofold: first, the narrator is hailed by the Beadle and interpellated into the patriarchal identity of irrational, less-than-human woman; secondly, her line of thought is yanked out of the stream of life, as, “in protection of their turf ”, the fellows and scholars “had sent [her] little fish DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 124 Paul Fagan into hiding” (1929: 10). This representation of women’s ‘Edenic’ exclusion from institutions of knowledge is compounded by the following scene in which a man “like a guardian angel […] with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings” bars her entry to the university library (Woolf 1929: 12). As we have seen, across the following six chapters A Room of One’s Own is dedicated to Woolf ’s attempts to understand women’s exclusion from patriarchal institutions, canons and histories and to think through a response to this gender-based segregation. But a second, interrelated theme that is set up in this opening set-piece is the narrator’s endeavour to transcend the emotion of anger - which she describes in Edenic terms as “the black snake” (48) - that women’s marginalisation produces in her. The question becomes how to return to this more profound engagement with the “reality” of the more-than-human “stream” of life (164 f.) having been hailed by the Beadle as an angry, excluded, inferior woman. Woolf ’s essay suggests the path back is through an openness to a different kind of interruption; not the divine voice of patriarchal authority, but of nonhuman perspectives. Sitting by the window at the Oxbridge luncheon party - a carnophallogocen‐ tric scene which connects phallocentric authority with the ingestion of animal flesh - the narrator spots “a cat without a tail”: The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal padding softly across the quadrangle changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me. […] [A]s I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe, something seemed lacking, something seemed different. (18) The Manx cat is among the essay’s most critically interrogated narrative images. Generally understood as a feminist figuration, the tailless cat is read variably as a pun on “the lost tales of women” ( Joplin 1983: 5), a metaphor for women’s lack of financial independence (Abel 1996: 98) - playing on “tail” as meaning the reverse side of a coin -, a sublimated image of women’s exclusion from phallocentric writing traditions (Childs 2007: 64), or a mockery of the “patriar‐ chal pathology” of Freudian penis envy (Neverow 2001: 56 f.). From a nonhuman studies perspective, to read the Manx cat’s appearance metaphorically is to identify it as a case of “anthropomorphic transference” (Derrida 2008: 129) - a projection of human social concerns onto the abstracted, figural nonhuman body without recognising its material reality. For Jacques Derrida, such an anthropomorphic “subjection” and “taming” of the nonhuman animal is always, ultimately, “a discourse of man, on man, […] for and in man” from which the animal itself is completely absent (37). Notably, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida deconstructs the animal’s anthropomorphic fabulisation through a scene in which he becomes the object of a cat’s gaze, directed at him “from a DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own 125 wholly other origin”, forcing him to confront the nonhuman other’s embodied subjectivity and to imagine “the human” as Other (13). Crucially, Woolf’s Manx cat is not only treated metaphorically but is indi‐ vidualised as an embodied subject with its own perspective. We are told that the narrator “watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn as if it too questioned the universe” (1929: 18) and reflects to herself, “Was he really born so, or had he lost his tail in an accident? ” (20). Monika Bregović reads the cat accordingly as both a zoometaphor - “an allegory of the exclusion of women from the systems of education and the history of literature” - and a subject in its own right (2019: 1). In the first case, the image scans as ecofeminist, in the non-pejorative identification it suggests between cats and women who “both have historically been regarded as deficient and inferior to the masculine-coded human” (2). In the second case, the cat, as a “queer animal” (Woolf 1929: 29) who walks freely on the grounds from which Woolf ’s narrator had been ejected, suggests a different way to transcend women’s interpellation within anthropocentric and androcentric discourses. The cat’s “queer” double status as both a figurative and a literal animal creates a rupture in Woolf ’s text that initiates a different movement of thought alongside its main social-feminist line. The half-glimpsed awareness of this individual cat’s subjecthood, and the narrator’s mindfulness of her own epistemological limits regarding the cat’s perspective (“as if it too questioned the universe”), introduces a nonhuman vantage point that is distinct from both the transspecies sympathies of anti-vivisectionist feminism and the pejorative associations of second-wave ecofeminism. In Woolf ’s thinking, this rupture is apocalyptic in its capacity to reimagine radically the relationships and limits between gender, environment, writing and history. The sight of the Manx cat leads Woolf’s narrator to “[link] the lost tail to a rupture or violent break in the continuity of culture: the war that destroyed illusions” ( Joplin 1983: 5). Crucially, the narrator observes that the change has not occurred at the level of human discourse, which goes on as before the First World War, but in the atmospheric, non-linguistic “murmur or current behind it” (1929: 19). The narrator posits that the violent shock of the war broke “women[’s] […] illusions about education” - a central cause of first-wave feminism - and asks, provocatively, “[w]hy, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe […] that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place? ” (23). From this point, her commissioned lecture on “Women and Fiction” shifts from its initial focus on women’s economic and educational marginalisation to the more complex task of distinguishing truth from illusion in interrelated human and nonhuman spheres: “What was the truth about these houses”, she asks, “[a]nd DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 126 Paul Fagan the willows and the river and the gardens that run down to the river […] - which was the truth, which was the illusion about them? ” (23 f.). Woolf’s rhetoric of an event that breaks illusions and discloses truth is apocalyptic in the biblical sense. Slavoj Žižek observes a distinction between the religious meaning of apocalypse as a revelation that “discloses something hidden, the ultimate truth that is concealed from us in our ordinary lives” and the modern rhetoric that refers to “any large-scale catastrophic event, or chain of detrimental events to humanity or nature, as apocalyptic” (2020: 745). These two meanings of apocalypse are intermingled in Woolf ’s rhetoric of the war as a “catastrophe” that “destroyed illusion and put truth in its place” (1929: 23). In thinking societal catastrophe and apocalyptic revelation in ecofeminist terms, Woolf here anticipates Julia Kristeva’s critique of biblical apocalyptic rhetoric. From Eve’s ejection from Eden for eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge to God’s judgment and destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Kristeva reads biblical apocalypse narratives as inherently patriarchal, reactionary and authoritarian expressions of a “sacred horror for the feminine” (1982: 205). Despite their claim to the revelation of a profound truth, “[i]n no case”, Kristeva insists, “is there philosophical unveiling […] of the hidden” in “the rigid […] moral position” of patriarchal apocalyptic narratives, which attempt rather to purge difference and reinstate hierarchical binaries (205). With regard to Woolf ’s narrower ecofeminist concern here, we can understand this patriarchal apocalyptic mode as the drive to purge the less-than-human women from the category of ‘enlightened human’ and to renounce the continuity of human and nonhuman life. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf ’s narrator identifies such a patriarchal apocalyptic attitude in Mussolini’s political and cultural programme of “unmitigated masculinity”, expressed in the vision of “an age to come of pure, of self-assertive virility” (1929: 154 f.). Such masculinist apocalyptic rhetoric, Woolf insists, gains its legitimacy through the “illusion” of “woman” as a “queer, composite being”, “an odd monster” or chimeric “worm winged like an eagle” akin to those envisioned by John the Revelator (66). To counter the patriarchal apocalyptic mindset, Woolf suggests, it is necessary to break this illusion, to reveal that “these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact” (66). Entering the gardens of Fernham, Woolf’s narrator catches a glimpse of “the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish” and “the flash of some terrible reality leaping […] out of the heart of the spring” (25 f.). This apocalyptic image is developed in distinctly Kristevan terms through Woolf ’s assertion that “the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish” (25). In Powers of Horror, Kristeva counters the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own 127 violent, purging patriarchal “revelation” of the moral “truth” of anthropocentric and androcentric hierarchy with the carnivalesque spirit of what she terms a “laughing apocalypse” that “does not keep to the rigid, […] moral position of apocalyptic inspiration; it transgresses it, sets its repressed against it” (1982: 205). In Woolf ’s text, the possibility of such a laughing apocalypse is spurred by her chance encounter with the Manx cat’s deferred gaze at the cosmos, and her consequent reflections on the unspoken, atmospheric change brought about by the war, uncapturable through direct human language. Revealingly, she explains her nonsensical laughter upon these reflections to the assembled Oxbridge diners “by pointing at the Manx cat” (1929: 20). The narrator’s casual wondering at the cat’s individual experience and viewpoint alerts her, then, not only to the limits of human perspective but also to the ways in which these limits underpin the authoritarian apocalypticism of anthropocentric and androcentric historical narratives. At the British Museum, she reflects that she “should need to be a herd of elephants, […] and a wilderness of spiders” and have “claws of steel and beak of brass” to be able to work through all that men have written on the subject of women (40). Reading the lunch edition of the evening paper at the museum’s restaurant, she imagines its headlines from an alien, extra-planetary perspective: “The most transient visitor to this planet […] who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware […] that England is under the rule of a patriarchy” (50). Elsewhere in the essay, a woman’s perspective is identified as comparably alien: “if one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, […] when from being the natural inheritor of [human] civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, outside of it, alien and critical” (146). Together, this network of relational human-nonhuman perspectives shifts Woolf’s essay toward a planetary feminist poetics that explores the global interconnections of human and nonhuman lives in order to reimagine their shared histories and futures. Woolf’s modernist apocalyptic variation on ecofeminist thought, gained through an openness to nonhuman perspectivity, grants her narrator an increas‐ ingly atemporal, posthuman vantage point, from which she reconceives her essay’s central problem along both preand post-human timelines. She imagines a world untransformed by patriarchal apocalyptic drives: “probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle” and humans “should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins” (53 f.). She sees Oxbridge from a geological temporal perspective: “this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings and the chapel itself was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled” (14). Her discussion with Mary Seton at Fernham expresses a vision of deep history, contrasting DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 128 Paul Fagan the origins of Oxbridge - “a scene […] some five centuries ago” of kings and nobles shovelling “sacks of gold and silver […] into the earth” - with those of Fernham - a scene “of lean cows and a muddy market and withered greens and the stringy hearts of old men” (29). She also projects forward to radical visions of a posthuman future - “The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years” (28) - and a dystopian iteration of a post-gender future - “in a hundred years […] will not women die off so much younger [and] quicker than men that one will say, ‘I saw a woman to-day’, as one used to say, ‘I saw an aeroplane’” (61). The essay argues for the necessity of holding in one’s mind simultaneously these distinct temporal “pictures” of past, present and future “coming together and combating each other […], disjointed and disconnected and nonsensical as they were” (29). For Woolf, crucially, this atemporal more-than-human imaginary is accessible only through a revelation of the illusions of anthropocentric and androcentric discourse that allows for a reconnection to the “stream” of more-than-human reality. It is this nonhuman temporal perspective that allows Woolf ’s narrator to see at once the deeper connection between “the current which took the boat and the undergraduate and the dead leaves” and “the current” of a taxi in the “great machine” of London that takes “the man and the woman” travelling together “into that tremendous stream” (144 f., 59, 39, 158). In this context, Woolf ’s advocacy that woman writers develop an “androgynous mind” (148) can be read as a vision of the post-gender and post-human writer. Conclusion In her lecture’s closing remarks, Woolf expresses her belief that if we live another century or so […] and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we […] see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves […], then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. (1929: 171 f.) As Peter Adkins argues, Woolf’s imagined potential for the life of a twenty-first-century writer “is a vision where changes in the material conditions that determine who can write and what is written might produce not only a wider range of opportunities for women writers but a more ecologically attentive form of writing” which “reflect[s] on the wider more-than-human DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own 129 reality within which we all live” (2022: 1). For Adkins, Woolf ’s conclusion speaks forward to twenty-first-century concerns with anthropogenic climate crisis (“if we live another century or so”). I would add that the essay’s development of an ‘apocalyptic’ revelation of a collapsed distinction between the male and female mind, and between ‘human beings’ and more-than-human ‘reality’, is ultimately what distinguishes Woolf ’s ecofeminist essay from the nineteenth-century movement: what is needed, she insists, is not only a subsistence for (certain) women to be educated into patriarchal institutions and included in the anthro‐ pocentric category of ‘the human’, but the material and economic infrastructure for them to escape their interpellation into this worldview, to rediscover their ‘alien perspective’ on the human social world and their connection to more-than-human reality. Only as a consequence of thus unveiling the sky, Woolf suggests, might women’s writing be reborn in an altogether new form. Works Cited Abbott, Reginald. 1995. “Birds don’t sing in Greek: Virginia Woolf and ‘The Plumage Bill’”. In: Adams, Carol J./ Donovan, Josephine, eds., 263-286. Abel, Elizabeth. 1996. 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Virginia Woolf Miscellany 86, 29-33. Žižek, Slavoj. 2020. “The Apocalypse of a Wired Brain”. Critical Inquiry 46/ 4, 745-763. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0006 Unveiling the Sky: Ecofeminist Revelations in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own 133 1 Twitter user @cinematogrxphy originated the label ‘Good for her’ in August 2020 (Gaffney 2021). The name references a quote from the series Arrested Development (2003-2006, 2013-2019), which became a social media meme. Since 2020, the term ‘Good for her’ has also found its way into discourses of culture studies and media studies, particularly in feminist media critique of contemporary horror films (Crutchley 2023; Frantz 2024). While the Twitter post which originated the moniker ‘Good for her’ included two examples of women of colour, namely Lupita Nyong’o in Us (2019) and Ana de Armas in Knives Out (2019), the archetype of angry anti-heroine in film is predominantly white (and there has also been not much diversity in terms of sexuality or non-normative genders). The continuing prevalence of the racist cultural archetype of the Angry Black Women most probably impedes a more diverse representation in mainstream media. Nonetheless there are recent notable examples of Black horror cinema with female protagonists which consciously react to such racialised stereotypes “I feel like becoming the monster he made”: Politics of Anger in Narratives of Nonhuman Femme Monsters in Stone Blind (2022) and The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home (2020) Laura Handl Anger, violence and femineity in contemporary US pop-culture The social norms of heteropatriarchal cultures about anger are often explored and theorised within the hegemonial narrative scripts of pop-culture (Campbell 1994: 54; Kim 2013: 5). In recent years, one could observe an intriguing phenomenon: the popularity of the violent/ angry anti-heroine archetype salient across multiple medial modes of cultural production, such as Lisbeth Salander (Millennium trilogy, 2005-2007) or Amy Dunne (Gone Girl, 2012). In online pop-cultural discourses, Gone Girl’s successful film adaptation (2014) has been grouped under the tongue-in-cheek label ‘Good for her’ cinematic universe or ‘Good for her’ genre. The term originated with a viral Twitter post about popular contemporary films of the horror and thriller genre with female protagonists mostly focused on exploring anger, trauma, and often revenge. 1 These anti-her‐ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 of horror, such as Bad Hair (2020), Barbarian (2022) and The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (2023). 2 Welcome to Night Vale (WTNV) was first produced by Commonplace Books, then self-produced by Fink and Cranor through Night Vale Presents, and has published 280 episodes at the time of writing ( January 2026). The podcast is an example of a cult hit in online culture, having been popularized by word-of-mouth from niche social media spaces on Tumblr to the mainstream (McCulloch 2019: 64), becoming known for narratives with humorous and/ or dark, horrifying twists. The character, as it appears on the podcast, is usually referred to with the full phrase ‘The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home’, which is part of the general stylistic idiosyncrasy of the writing to introduce characters with long, descriptive phrases. In the following, for the sake of readability, I will nonetheless shorten the book title to The Faceless Old Woman and the character name to Faceless Old Woman or FOW. oines overcome affective suppression (of anger specifically) and the attempts to silence them, addressing the injustices they face and complicating the gendered, hegemonial archetypes of protagonist/ hero and antagonist/ monster. The same can be said of the two books which are examined in this contribution, which similarly to the anti-heroine of the ‘Good for her’ genre also echo contemporary gendered cultural politics of emotion by thematising their anger and using vigilante violence as a plot device. The first of the two fictional characters I am paralleling in this text is the titular protagonist of the 2020 gothic-fantasy adventure book The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home. Written by Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink, it is their latest book set in the narrative universe of their long-running podcast Welcome to Night Vale (2012-). 2 The second character is Gorgoneion, the main narrator of the novel Stone Blind (2022) by Natalie Haynes, which is a feminist retelling of the myth of Medusa. The two novels, which can both be called ‘monster’ narratives, or even monstrous retellings, in the context of their genre of mythic fantasy (Haynes) and supernatural gothic/ adventure story (Fink and Cranor), reflect the complex discourses and relations between anger as an expression of epistemic injustice and femme marginality in a system of patriarchal oppression. Gorgoneion and the Faceless Old Woman are nonhuman, but also depicted as fundamentally violated and deeply traumatised by structural violence, leading to an enraged incitement to achieve agency on a textual and meta-textual level. Although they attain narrative agency as retrospective, immortal narrators - overcoming silencing and defying death and time - the monstrous characters are denied con‐ ventional narrative catharsis. Since they do not achieve what they desperately long for, the protagonists reflect that denial and choose to embody resistance by wilfully transforming beyond limitations of mortality and humanity. Thereby, they also reject conventional morality, embracing destruction and violence themselves in response to the trauma inflicted by systemic violence. In their DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 136 Laura Handl 3 I invoke the melodramatic mode here, because two separate and intertwined charac‐ teristics of melodrama are represented by the two novels and the ‘Good for her’ films I mention as well. Firstly, they centre moral feeling, often gesturing towards a broader sense of (social) justice and as Christine Gledhill states “melodrama served also as conduit for shifts in ethical perception underpinning the emerging relations between individual and society” (2018: xiv). Secondly, melodramatic modality displays what I will follow E. Deidre Pribram in calling culturally embedded, relational emotionality, which others have sometime disparagingly called emotional excess (Pribram 2018: 244), which also fits to my analysis of anger expression specifically and the subversion of gendered scripts of emotional expression in general. own words, they become the monsters they already seem to be and are treated as by others (Haynes 2023: 3; Fink and Cranor 2020: 244), but at the same time they are the nonhuman anti-heroines of melodramatic plots. 3 Before delving deeper, I want to briefly explain my frequent use of the descriptor femme in my reading of the novels. The human descriptor of woman and female is not apt in the context of the novel’s worldbuilding, because both characters, Gorgoneion and FOW, are nonhuman/ more-than-human. Because Medusa, although mortal, is a Gorgon and the child of gods, her murder brings a new being into existence: Gorgoneion is Medusa’s sentient disembodied head and while they share memories, their characters and behaviours are vastly different. Meanwhile, the Faceless Old Woman is so removed from the human she once was that she literally loses her face in her transformation and becomes a liminal creature living in every house of the fictional town Night Vale simultaneously, eternally lurking and probably immortal. Both characters still identify with femineity and also explicitly reflect their subject position in relation to a heteropatriarchal social system, but they do not identify as human, which leads me to term their anger as femme rather than female, emphasising the sociocultural functions of gendering emotions in the nonhuman metaphor for discriminatory politics of othering and silencing. Anger and femme monstrosity I am approaching femme anger as put forth by Haynes and Fink and Cranor with a specific focus on feminist scholarship on the affects and emotion in popular culture. As Ann Cvetkovich states, affect studies helps to give answers to questions “of how to think the relation between the psychic and the social worlds and provide resources for building new cultures of public feeling” (2020: 8). In other words, theorising this relation is closely related to processes of social transformation, which makes affect studies highly relevant for discussing marginalised subject positions and their embeddedness in cultural narratives DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 Politics of Anger in Narratives of Nonhuman Femme Monsters 137 4 This fight for anger is fought on many fronts and has also been acknowledged by genre scholarship. For example, in her seminal, widely read study on gender in horror film, Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1992), Carol J. Clover states: “The women's movement has given many things to popular culture, some more savoury than others. One of its main donations to horror, I think, is the image of an angry woman - a woman so angry that she can be imagined as a credible perpetrator (I stress ‘credible’) of the kind of violence on which, in the low-mythic universe, the status of full protagonist rests” (2015: 17). and scripts. Sara Ahmed’s influential book on the cultural politics of emotion posits that normative orientations are communicated and mediated by cultural narratives (2014a: 144). Regarding anger, the power relation of the subject and object of this emotion is central, making it highly relevant to reading gender and how these normative orientations are negotiated (Gámez-Fuentes and Rottenberg 2025: 2). When brought into public discourse by popular culture, a reading of femme anger, therefore, has to be contextualised by considering these cultural narratives. In the words of Sue Campbell, feminist thinkers have been engaged in a “fight for anger” (1994: 54), which is an acknowledgement of its cultural and political significance in the context of gender discourses. 4 Elisabeth Spelman, in her influential essay “Anger and Insubordination”, observes that anger is the only emotion discouraged in subordinated groups, who are generally more associated with emotion in contrast to the ‘rationality’ of white men (1989: 264). Male, white expressions of anger are historically associated with concepts of cognitive appraisal of affects, especially when instrumentalised against subordinated social groups and reinforcing gendered and racialised power dynamics. Therefore, when expressed by the dominated person in social relations, anger criticises or even shifts a discriminatory hierarchy: “So my anger is […] an act of insubordination: I am acting as if I have as much right to judge him as he assumes he has to judge me” (Spelman 1989: 266). This conceptual link of social justice and anger expression is central to the unfolding and negotiation of social dynamics in the deliberation of affects in publics. My main theoretical basis for the existence of hegemonial cultural scripts on emotionality in relation to gendered social norms is Lauren Berlant. Their concept of the intimate public sphere can be defined as a mass market, which performs identification with a certain cultural group through “a sense of emotional continuity” (Berlant 2008: 5) via commodified genres of intimacy (x). Deviation from this emotional continuity, then, can jeopardise the possibilities for self-identification, however, the intimate public sphere also can employ cri‐ tique and political imagination “outside of intimate and economic normativity” (234). In The Female Complaint, Berlant focusses on women’s culture as the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 138 Laura Handl 5 Berlant describes the proximity between the culture of a minoritarian/ marginalized group and their political projects for social justice, such as women’s culture and feminisms, as juxtapolitical (2008: x), which is a useful term to describe their reciprocal relation, which is never explainable by linear causality. 6 In the words of Jilly Kay: “Significantly, this new registering of rage is occurring not only in the sphere of politics and protest as they are normatively understood; women’s anger is increasingly legible within popular and commercial cultural forms. Rage, it seems, is becoming all the rage. […] Given that, within the long history of western civilisation, women’s anger has been construed as deviant, monstrous or otherwise taboo, this is - we might say - quite something” (2019: 591). prime example for an intimate public sphere and identifies sentimentality and complaint as central affective frames, which can also manifest as feminine/ fem‐ inist rage (1, 246). 5 I argue that in the contemporary intimate public sphere of women’s culture, which is influenced by an intimate counterpublic sphere of feminism, the visibility of feminist movements of varying radicalism has led to the emergence of a hybrid aesthetics of sentimental femme anger in the mainstream. The upsurge of gendered anger as a prevalent affective mode in mainstream women’s culture is not easy to date, since it has been influenced by the ebb and flow of political opportunity for feminist movements. However, feminist writers in the US have enthusiastically turned toward a discussion of gendered anger in mainstream discourses since the first election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016 (Traister 2018; Chemaly 2018; Cooper 2018; Gross 2024). 6 Thereby anger is, though prevalent, of course only one affective modality in “a much more complex interdependent affective and material landscape” (Gámez-Fuentes and Rottenberg 2025: 11). When situating the contemporary focus on femme anger in Berlant’s concept of intimate public sphere, a con‐ temporary picture of women’s culture then also encompasses what can be termed feminist aesthetics of emotional insubordination. In literature, this can be expressed in narratives focalising on formerly marginalised perspectives to validate their emotional lives in the face of its historical suppression, for example feminist retellings. In the words of Maria Tatar in her study of the gendering of heroism The Heroine with a 1,001 Faces: “Writers today […] have resurrected marginalized women from times past and given them voices, affirming their resourcefulness and thereby endowing them with agency” (2021: 15). When we consider that this is platformed by a literary mass market, as Berlant pinpoints, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 Politics of Anger in Narratives of Nonhuman Femme Monsters 139 7 In other words, the medial expression of marginalized anger or generally dissent may be enough to absorb the affective tensions of femme positionality in social relations. Taking up the initial discussion of ‘Good for her’ films again: While there is currently a market for these kinds of narratives, this does not translate directly to political change for the every-day lives of women and femme people, who are able to express their emotions vicariously through the protagonist’s rage. this angry mode is enmeshed with sentimentality that can again placate this new expression of the ‘female complaint’. 7 I would like to suggest that the pitfall of sentimentality is avoided in the two novels here under consideration. When there is no narrative catharsis for this anger, not only a blockage of generic conventions (Berlant 2008: 4) - and when romantic love plots are completely absent (Haynes) or explicitly abandoned in favour of revenge (Fink and Cranor) without ambivalence or external conflict - the feminist affective mode of anger may avoid being transmuted into less insubordinate affects. Instead the feminist impetus of the two monstrous retellings is increased by the retrospective reflection of the protagonists’ narration, who (have to) sit with their anger. The sentimentality that is evoked by the genre conventions these books adhere to is contrasted by protagonists who are more-than-human with powerful abilities they are not afraid to use while still being dominated and impeded by heteropatriarchal systems. The notion of sitting with one’s anger resonates with the theme of mon‐ strousness in the novels The Faceless Old Woman and Stone Blind. While Gorgoneion and the FOW are denied revenge, their sitting with anger finds its expression in excessive violence. Thereby, the novels’ politics of femme anger are closely connected to physical violence and the systemic (and symbolic) violence of unjust knowledge management tactics of white heteropatriarchy, such as silencing (Bailey 2018: 93-98). In both novels, the protagonists commit violence against others by embracing their anger as a reaction to systemic and symbolic injustice they experienced in relation to male figures in their lives, which is refracted through their self-positioning as femme ‘monsters’. In Stone Blind, Gorgoneion conveys to the reader that she is deeply offended by the rendering of Perseus as a hero who celebrates her murder as his success time and again, being privy to the perpetual retellings of Perseus’ ‘heroic’ myth (e.g. Haynes 2023: 3). The FOW calls herself a monster when she realises how she has been instrumentalised by her former friend Edmond, to not only destroy the legacy of her father, but also murder her own aunt: “I was a monster, for what I had done to my own family” (Fink and Cranor 2020: 244). This initial imposition of the label of monster while she is human, leads her to decide DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 140 Laura Handl 8 An example for the variations in ancient literary sources is the connection between the powers of Gorgoneion, Perseus murder, and Poseidon’s rape of Medusa. Apollodorus, in one of the earliest more detailed writings on the Perseus myth, already mentions the rape of Medusa by Poseidon, explaining the birth of Pegasus and Chrysaor from her corpse (Anderson 1997: 494). But while he connects this to her transformation from a beautiful mortal to a disembodied head with snake hair, according to Apollodorus, all three Gorgons have the power to petrify (1921: 2.4.2). However, in Ovid’s Metamor‐ phoses, only Medusa’s transformation to having snake hair is conveyed by Perseus, when he is asked to give her backstory during the celebration of his victory over the sea on an eternal revenge against her nemesis, culminating in her transformation into a nonhuman monster. With and through the anger they express, both figures in the end embrace a change in their self-concept. Their transformation beyond humanity/ mortality, gives them the narrative agency (through their immortality), enabling them to tell their stories. The solace they find in violence represents a break with anger as the complaint of the woman and instead positions anger as the essence of excessive femme wilfulness. Before I trace the narrative structure that enables the subversion, I first want to contextualise how the books’ embeddedness in genre expectation evokes sentimentality by mythologising femme monstrosity. The mythology of Stone Blind and The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home At first glance, the novels are vastly different in their setting and context. But their approaches to the characters Gorgoneion and Faceless Old Woman are quite similar when read through the lens of gendered politics of anger and with a focus on the representation of femme agency in narratives. While Fink and Cranor created the FOW within the narrative universe of the fictional podcast Welcome to Night Vale, with its own elaborate worldbuilding and vast mythology, Haynes’s book is a retelling of Greek myths around the goddess Athene and the story of the mythical hero Perseus centring the character that connects them: Medusa/ Gorgoneion. In Greek mythology, the Gorgon Medusa is the only mortal sister of three, cursed with snake-hair and a stone-stare by Athena after Poseidon raped her in the goddess’s temple. While the novel Stone Blind and other versions of the myth include this backstory, from ancient sources until today, the figure of Medusa has been depicted in literary and visual art in various ways, as Dunstan Lowe describes in his cultural history of the character in The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024: 106-118). One fixed element of most literary versions of the myth is that Medusa is murdered by Perseus, son of Zeus. 8 DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 Politics of Anger in Narratives of Nonhuman Femme Monsters 141 monster and rescue of Andromeda and Ovid “ignores” how she “acquired the power to petrify” (Anderson 1997: 496). These written accounts all follow a long tradition of ancient art works with visual gorgoneia motifs, which leads Natalie Haynes, in her more essayistic book Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths, to state: “Perseus was most likely added to Medusa’s story to explain her existence and our interest in her separated head, rather than Medusa appearing in Perseus’ story to give him a monster to fight” (92). In that logic, the power of petrification was the original starting point of the myth of Perseus and subsequently also a priori to its ancient literary accounts. 9 “Wouldn't the worst be, isn't the worst, in truth, that women aren't castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing”. (Cixous 1976: 885) Although modern iterations often change the inciting incident for Perseus’ quest to decapitate Medusa (e.g. in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans), in ancient versions of the myth he is tasked by King Polydectes of Seriphos to bring him her head and Natalie Haynes picks this up for Stone Blind. This tribute is part of an ultimatum as otherwise the King will marry Perseus’ unwilling mother Danaë (Haynes 2021: 93, 97). Perseus is supported by many Olympians, who valorise his quest by equipping him with gifts and knowledge. The injustice of Medusa’s fate, being murdered and then weaponised for mass murders because of the whims of men and gods, has frequently led to her being used as a metaphor in feminist writing and art, with one famous example being Hélène Cixous’s essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976). 9 What I find unique about the approach of Stone Blind to the character is the narrative focalisation of nonhuman perspectives, which begins with Gorgoneion, but does not end there. Stone Blind is narratively reminiscent of Haynes’ so-far best-known book A Thousand Ships (2019). In this novel - in what Lena Linne calls an ambivalent mode of meta-epic reflection of Homer’s Iliad (in contrast to both affirmative and subversive modes that have been prevalent in other retellings) (2022: 65) - the author presents a multifaceted narrative of the Trojan War by including an array of female narrators involved in the events. In Stone Blind this approach to narrative structure is expanded to also include chapters from the perspective of various nonhumans. Haynes gives voices to animals and plants (e.g. crows or reeds) as well as occasionally to the male gods involved (e.g. Hephaistos or Poseidon). Crucially, one chapter is a dialogue between the snakes on Gorgoneion’s head, who discuss the death of Medusa, on which I will focus at a later point. The nonhuman narrators give Haynes’s version of the Greek world a lived-in-ness and sense of holistic interdependency between all beings that is disturbed by the power plays of Olympians and humans. Haynes’s narrative is deeply involved in the wider Greek mythological world, as she DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 142 Laura Handl includes side plots about the broader ripple effects of Olympian politics, leading to and following the murder of Medusa. Through the paratextual element of the dramatis personae preceding the story and the stylistic focus on dialogue, Stone Blind evokes the main historical genre of the ancient Greek mythology, drama, also listing the nonhuman characters. Thereby they are outside of the preceding binary character categories of immortal and mortal, they are “Other” (Haynes 2023: viii). The novel’s focalising on Medusa’s former head as a femme nonhuman monster might be perceived as parallel to Barbara Creed’s interpretation of Medusa as monstrous-feminine, which is informed by Sigmund Freud’s psycho‐ analytical readings of Greek myths. However, I disagree with her claim that the pop-cultural depiction of Gorgoneion on the shield of Athene evokes “the imaginary castrating mother” (Creed 2007: 166). While Creed does find feminist potentiality in the reading of Gorgoneion (or Athene) as archaic mothers, the novel Stone Blind does not root the subject position of either character in motherhood. Instead, it shows in a meta-reflective way the hubris of gods, such as Athene’s striving for power and relevance, and the senselessness of the violence caused by Olympian favouritism towards male ‘hero’ archetypes. It is actually the role as daughter that is in the forefront for both Medusa/ Gorgoneion and Athene, as they themselves are defined by the absence of their mothers, whose murders are included in the narrative. Thereby Haynes’s retelling evokes the external threat of patriarchal violence towards mother-child relationships, rather than showing these relations to be psychologically determined. This connection of the social systems and the personal is rooted in the book’s melodramatic relational emotionality: “Melodramatic modes of storytelling, grounded in emotions and felt recognition - involving us in perceptions of how we do, might, or ought to feel things - enable us to connect with and understand the narrative and social worlds we occupy” (Pribram 2018: 251). In Stone Blind, Gorgoneion begins with the observation that history gives the role of the monster to those who are not saved (Haynes 2023: 3). Heroic quests are due to whim or narcissistic self-aggrandisement or for gods to legitimise the existence of half-god offspring; heroes are mass murderers (349) and monsters are objectified and/ or hurdles to their will to power. Felt recognition about these reframings of Greek mythology is achieved through the central theme of storytelling itself with Gorgoneion’s self-aware narration as the central vehicle of confronting a narrative ‘You’ with their own preconceptions about hero epics (e.g. perceiving Perseus as a “reluctant hero”, 112). Therefore, the notion of storytelling is explicitly reflected, leading me to also apply Linne’s label of DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 Politics of Anger in Narratives of Nonhuman Femme Monsters 143 10 The cult status of the character is amplified by the voice actress, Mara Wilson, previously mostly known as a child actress, infusing the characterisation with the strength, passion, and dry deliveries in complete opposition to the wholesome image she accumulated for her starring roles in films such as Matilda (1996). meta-reflective to Stone Blind, which also implicitly achieves this reflection through narrative structure. The approach to the femme monstrous protagonists in Stone Blind and The Faceless Old Woman is similar in several regards. Firstly, the character of the Faceless Old Woman corresponds to Gorgoneion in how the narration heightens emotional involvement of the reader. Both characters direct their narration to an implied audience, sometimes even pleading with or raging against a narrative ‘You’. This also contributes to a second similarity, the level of self-referentiality, heightening awareness of genre and narrative conventions. Alison Bainbridge describes self-referentiality as one of the main characteristics of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale in general (2019: 181) and I argue this can also be applied to the accompanying books by Fink and Cranor. On the level of narration, the self-referentiality of Stone Blind and The Faceless Old Woman presents also as meta-reflectivity displayed by both figures about their literary contexts, meaning a reflection on storytelling and narrative itself, which manifests explicitly as claiming agency through their voice and implicitly through the narrative structure. The deep embeddedness in a narratively rich environment of varying (Me‐ dusa) and/ or cumulative (FOW) ‘canon stories’ evokes complex temporalities for the novels at hand, which consciously relate to previous incarnations or versions of themselves, resulting in a sense of sentimental nostalgia. In the Night Vale narrative universe, the character of FOW is not part of a serial narrative, but of what Collins and Barrios-O’Neill call a cumulative narrative (2018: 36), which invites listeners’ engagement to pick up on far and widely sprinkled intriguing details about the context of characters. The tone of the WTNV podcast is often reminiscent of folklore stories, which also bleeds into the novel, with tight formulaic arcs per episode as well as overarching storylines, or even different narrative eras. The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home appears from the first year of broadcasting onward and is one of the show’s most memorable figures on account of being whimsical and simultaneously casually destructive, volatile and also coldly calculating. 10 In Night Vale, the FOW lives in the homes of all its residents simultaneously and only occasionally appears just out of the corner of one’s eye. She is depicted as opinionated, always addressing a narrative ‘You’, with judgement and commentary on their behaviour (she sees all) in their shared living space: ‘Your Home’. Her strong feelings about ‘Your DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 144 Laura Handl 11 While ‘wilful’ as a term has a misogynist history, I use it in the context of Sara Ahmed’s work on Willful Subjects (2014b): “the will can be rearticulated in terms of the not: whether understood as possibility or capacity, as the possibility of not being compelled by an external force […], or as the capacity to say or enact a ‘no’ to what has been given as instruction. Indeed, wilfulness as a judgment tends to fall on those who are not compelled by the reasoning of others. Wilfulness might be what we do when we are judged as being not, as not meeting the criteria for being human, for instance” (2014: 15). Home’ and ‘You’ may lead her to send messages in the manner of a poltergeist, which she prefers to verbal communication. Nonetheless, she possesses a body, being material as well as metaphysical. Mostly, the Faceless Old Woman is omnipresent, omnipotent, and wilful. 11 The Faceless Old Woman tells the backstory of her transformation into her monstrous form and the centuries-long journey, which led her to the desert community of Night Vale, USA. While the FOW was born human, she became more-than-human when she failed to fulfil a long quest for vengeance against her nemesis Edmond. Instead of dying after being shot and left to drown, she resurrects herself as an undead being of agency fuelled by rage: Edddddmmmmooonnnnd, I hissed with my last usable breath. I wanted Edmond dead in my arms. I wanted him to cough his last blood-splattered breath right into my lap. […] The stars became still. My lungs stopped burning. I could breathe. Upon saying his vile name, I was standing, full of anger and purpose, on the gnarled wooden pier again, facing upward to the sky. (Fink and Cranor 2020: 315) When she is still unable to murder Edmond before he dies of natural causes, not being able to master her new embodiment in time, she is revealed in the novel to be fuelled by a continuous drive for revenge into the present day in Night Vale. She raises Edmond’s male descendants from the shadows, until they become the fathers of sons to repeat her life’s purpose: “I didn’t get a life, Darius. I didn’t get a family. What I get instead, again and again, is the dawning epiphany of horror on those men’s faces, faces that look exactly like Edmond’s. And each time it delights me” (364). I invoke the gothic genre for this book, defined by Jack Halberstam as “the rhetorical style and narrative structure designed to produce fear and desire within the reader” (1995: 2). Alison Bainbridge also locates the podcast in the realm of queer contemporary gothic horror stories (2019; 2020) and the book’s focus on the nonhuman monstrosity of the FOW, similarly to WTNV, “make[s] strange the categories of beauty, humanity, and identity that we still cling to” (Halberstam 1995: 6). Gorgoneion and the FOW are two constant figures in temporarily multilay‐ ered narratives, conscious of their own embeddedness in these chronotopes, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 Politics of Anger in Narratives of Nonhuman Femme Monsters 145 which are in conversation with and in some ways determined by their meta-textual relations. This may be more obvious for Haynes’s work about Medusa/ Gorgoneion, a narrative and visual icon with a long artistic history, than for Fink and Cranor’s novel. In the following, I make an exemplary argument for each of the books to illustrate my claim. In Stone Blind, Haynes intermittently includes multiple short chapters cap‐ tioned “Stone” describing statues in relation to the happenings of the preceding chapter. They are a meta-textual reference to the many works of sculptors depicting Perseus as a triumphant hero, such as Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus with the Head of Medusa. Building a counter-narrative to such subordinated incarnations of Gorgoneion, the chapters also invoke the figure of a sculptor. However, within the narrative there is no artistic intention, as the statues are all caused by Medusa/ Gorgoneion. At first the statues are the animals Medusa accidentally turns to stone in the early days of her curse (Haynes 2023: 64, 120 f., 203), then, crucially, one chapter describes the absence of a statue of Perseus, when he attacked the sleeping Medusa. “There is no statue here” (Haynes 2023: 286), because Medusa, although revealed to have awoken in the moments before dying, did not open her eyes to kill Perseus. Nonetheless, the “idea” (287) of the statue, which would have existed had Medusa opened her eyes, is described in vivid details from the perspective of a performatively objective narrator, who is in conversation with a narrative ‘You’. The recurring “Stone” chapters are rewriting not only the literary, but also visual cultural history of the figure of Medusa/ Gorgoneion. Evoking that exact long artistic history, stirs affects in readers, who are presented with a part of cultural history that does not exist, an injustice and failing of reality. Thereby, however, the absence is not only directly pointed at, but intricately shaped in the style of a sculpture that does not exist, but can elicit nostalgia for the aesthetic formalisation of Medusa’s past depictions, such as that of Cellini. In the last chapter, the last statue Gorgoneion ‘creates’ (petrified Athene) is described from the perspective of Gorgoneion, suggesting that previous “Stone” chapters are also in her omniscient, nonhuman voice. My example for The Faceless Old Woman regards the further genre conven‐ tions the book evokes beyond the gothic and in connection to sentimental nostalgia. The book subverts pop cultural swashbuckler narratives, which revolve around, in the words of James Chapman, “chivalric heroes of old: knights bold and good, dashing swordsmen, gentlemen outlaws, daring sea captains and fearless masked avengers” (2015: 1). Present in literature, film and TV, these retrospective tales romanticise “[the] swashbuckling hero [as] a mythic DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 146 Laura Handl 12 In the context of mythic archetypes of heroes present in ‘all cultures’, Joseph Campbell’s scientifically refuted, but sociocultural prevalent monomyth theory comes to mind. The monomyth’s narrative paradigms without doubt influence these folkloristic, his‐ toricised, and idealised swashbuckler archetypes of heroism and the commodification of adventure stories in entertainment media. 13 The previous knowledge of those familiar with the podcast is engaged through intertextual references, giving more context to the alternative geography of Europe in the WTNV narrative universe, such as the countries of Franchia, Svitz or Luftnarb (Fink et al. 2016: 208-216). archetype that exists in the popular folklore of all cultures” (1). 12 Swashbuckler plots are journeys of adventure set in specific historical periods with examples including books such as the Treasure Island (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson and The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley (1919) or films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Ivanhoe (1952). The Faceless Old Woman, similarly to these stories, is a tale of adventure and set mainly in an alternative version of eighteenth/ nineteenth-century Mediterranean Europe. 13 The plot elements of adventurous scheming and piracy as well as the main motivator of avenging the death of the father is reminiscent of swashbuckler icons such as Alexandre Dumas’s titular, The Count of Monte Christo (1846) or Inigo Montoya of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (1973). The main differences between them and FOW - next to gender, as the swashbuckler archetype is usually male - is the lack of narrative catharsis to the revenge plot. The FOW’s origin story enhances the anarchistic or vigilante tendencies of these narratives and then subverts the generic plot structure by finally transforming its protagonist into a nonhuman being of pure will in pursuit of revenge. Fink and Cranor’s blend of gothic horror in the present-day storyline set in Night Vale and the retrospective narrative of high adventure plays with readers’ expectations and the further functions of this juxtaposition will become clearer in the following. Narrative structure and denial of catharsis The nature of the complex relations between femme monsters and anger in these novels is also reflected in their narrative structure. In Stone Blind the arrangement of the chapters from the perspective of many narrators generally does not follow a linear spacetime, but is structured in five thematic parts to delineate the emotional arcs of the characters. In the second part, titled “Mother”, the predicament of Perseus’ mother Danaë is laid out from her perspective, as she is a pawn in the unfounded resentment of King Polydectes against his brother Dictys, who adopted the mother and her child Perseus. After Perseus is tasked with the quest to kill Medusa by Polydectes, the next chapter from the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 Politics of Anger in Narratives of Nonhuman Femme Monsters 147 14 This is not the first emergence of this theme in Stone Blind: the third chapter, which is the first with a narrative arch and plot points, is recounted from the perspective of the shapeshifting goddess of wisdom, Metis, who Zeus first raped and then, when she fell pregnant, consumed (Haynes 2023: 6-12). This sets up the melodramatic emotionality of the novel’s tone and simultaneously delineates how Athene came to be born from the head of Zeus. perspective of Gorgoneion begins with directly addressing the reader: “You’re probably feeling sorry for him now, aren’t you? ” (Haynes 2023: 112). The chapter proceeds to sarcastically lay out how Danaë’s situation could have been handled in other ways than killing Medusa. The narrator rages against the positive portrayal of Perseus in iterations of the mythos, who is not a hero, but a “vicious little thug” (114). The subsequent chapter then is narrated from Athene’s point of view, who has just discovered that Poseidon has raped Medusa in her temple and vows revenge on the Gorgon since Poseidon is out of her reach. By juxtaposing Gorgoneion’s anger towards Perseus with the prideful anger of Athene against Poseidon about ‘profaning’ her temple, Stone Blind shows the cycle of violence in patriarchal power structures, scapegoating femineity (Danaë’s and Medusa’s) and afflicting violence according to logics which are revealed as absurd. Crucially, this second part ends with Medusa’s transformation into her snake-hair and stone-glare form, which is described as horrifying and traumatic for her. Haynes concludes with the immediate effects of Athene’s revenge, which is arbitrarily directed at a target that “would do” (117) in lieu of being able to reach Poseidon and even though Medusa “screamed until her voice was [gone, it] changed nothing” (119). In part three, titled “Blind”, the arrangement of chapters narrated by Gorgo‐ neion and Athene is repeated: After the description of Perseus’ visit to and betrayal of the Graiai, Gorgoneion again challenges readers who still sympathise with Perseus, asking: “Would it kill you to be sympathetic about someone who isn’t as fortunate as you are? ” (157). This is followed by Hephaistos’s sexual assault on Athene, an act that reiterates that also the most powerful femme beings are never physically or affectively protected from the systemic violence within the patriarchal value system. 14 Parallel to Poseidon’s rape of Medusa, Athene sees any attempt of direct revenge as futile, because Hephaistos reveals he was encouraged in his ‘courtship’ by Zeus and Poseidon. Faced with her powerlessness, Athene internalises the shame of her violation and keeps it secret from the other Olympians. The positioning of Athene as traumatised and violated herself is complicated by the subsequent chapter’s description of the Gorgon sisters, Medusa, Sthenno and Euryale, coping with the aftermath of DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 148 Laura Handl Athene’s curse. Thereby the idea of Medusa as a monster is relativised while the cruelty of the Olympias is centred with Athene as an ambivalent figure. Two essential differences are noticeable between this retelling and other versions of the story of Medusa, which are both closely connected to the framing of Gorgoneion’s anger. Firstly, Medusa wakes up shortly before her murder and chooses not to use her stone gaze on Perseus and, secondly, the sea monster Perseus attacks to save his future wife Andromeda is in fact goddess Ceto, Medusa’s absent mother, sent there by Poseidon. The first difference constitutes the affective turning point of the fourth of the five parts of the novel and is told through a chapter styled as a dialogue between the snakes on Gorgoneion’s head: β: No, you’re lying. She was asleep. α: Until the final moment she was asleep. β: If what you’re saying is true, why didn’t she open her eyes? ε: You know why. δ: You know why. β: I don’t. α: Because she wouldn’t kill him. (Haynes 2023: 284 f.) This chapter sets up clearly how Gorgoneion’s characterisation diverges from Medusa’s, distancing herself from Medusa’s morality and refusing to save anyone. Instead, she starts to embrace nihilistic anger: I don’t feel like saving mortals any more. I don’t feel like saving anyone any more. I feel like opening my eyes and taking in everything I can see whenever I get the chance. […] I feel like becoming the monster [Perseus] made. I feel like that. (304) In the final part of the novel, this embrace of her limited agency is transformed into a questioning of this monstrous self-concept: [Perseus] thinks anyone who is not like him is a monster: have you noticed? And any monster needs killing. I wonder if he told himself the priests were monsters too. They were far more monstrous than Ceto, as I see it. But they’re all dead, just the same. How long did I look at her before I realized she was my mother? How long did she look at me? No time at all. A heartbeat, if either of us had a heart left to beat. There is one question that devours me still. Why didn’t I close my eyes? (332 f.) The final question points at an open-ended ambivalence towards Gorgoneion’s nonhuman anger. While she feels no remorse in killing per se, Gorgoneion in this reflection directly connects the violence of identifying monstrousness DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 Politics of Anger in Narratives of Nonhuman Femme Monsters 149 with the fragility of her own self-positioning as monstrous. She does not fully know who she is as this monster, because in the end the label is illocutionary, a performance of an empty signifier. By becoming the monster Perseus and the Olympians made, Gorgoneion becomes less known to herself and ends the novel embracing death-like sleep on the bottom of the ocean as a mercy. When contemplating the narrative structure of The Faceless Old Woman, I perceive a recurring figure as central to a reading of the FOW’s angry transformation into a more-than-human monster: the ‘lurching man’. Within the first pages, one of the Old Woman’s earliest memories is a vision of a man, lurching and then falling forward (Fink and Cranor 2020: 16). This dark omen follows the protagonist throughout the years, for example appearing when her father dies in a housefire (57) or when she condemns someone to be executed, who later turns out to be her aunt (101; 133). This turns out to be a temporal anomaly when the premonition catches up with her on the day of her human death in 1863. The man is revealed to be a minor character, Venedict, introduced only ten pages prior, who is caught in the crossfire of the FOW’s foiled revenge against Edmond: She accidentally stabs him instead of Edmond, the vision being him in his dying moment (279). The revelation of the ‘lurching man’ presents a pivotal point in the narrative arc of the FOW’s characterisation, revealing the inevitability of the FOW’s failure to ever achieving agency beyond Edmond’s manipulation of her in her human form. The trajectory of the appearances of the ‘lurching man’ is connected by the reveal of his identity and points towards two facts: the FOW will always choose revenge, because that is how she was made and Edmond will always evade that revenge, because he is the one who made her. Between her murder of Venedict and her transformation into her monstrous form, a crucial intermediate presents a prolepsis to 2020. In the contemporary storyline set in Night Vale, the Faceless Old Woman viciously murders Craig, the man she had been living with and caring for many years (283-292). There is no reason given and the violence seems arbitrary, as does the structure, since the next chapter is again set back in 1863. Therein, she dies and transforms, remaking herself into her own faceless form: “In my rage, I can be anywhere, do anything. Vengeance is my path and I must never veer from it” (315). The juxtaposition of Craig’s seemingly senseless murder and the FOW’s transformation is reframed by the final chapter of the book, again set in 2020, the novel’s present day (357-365). At that point, another attempt on Edmond’s life in her new powerful form had failed, and the FOW had followed Edmond’s descendants to the US. She now addresses Darius, Craig’s infant child, and explains that he is the latest child in Edmond’s line. One day, when she has DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 150 Laura Handl ensured that he also bears a son, the FOW will also execute him: “Remember me, my nosey-wosey, baby boy. Remember my story. One day you’ll have a son, and that will be the happiest day of your life. And of mine” (365). From her viewpoint this never-ending revenge is proportionate to Edmond’s crimes, recreating his destruction of her family: “I would take from Edmond what he sought to take from me: lineage. He destroyed my family’s future. And I will return the favor forever” (363). The FOW makes herself the immortal authority over the death of Edmond’s lineage and therefore also encloses herself into a cycle of self-making through the violence she inflicts. Her relentless anger has made her nonhuman and through it she mirrors Edmond’s own monstrousness back onto his legacy, eternally thwarting his desire for immortality - thereby also ironically eternally dragging out his lineage, if under her control. The reader is left horrified and in awe of what the narrator has always been from the first page onwards. Conclusion Both Gorgoneion and the FOW present narratives of femme anger’s trans‐ formative power, which nonetheless is insufficient to fulfil their desires for agency and revenge against the privileged of a systemic imbalance in power. Gorgoneion and Faceless Old Woman simultaneously show the power and the fragility of anger against the patriarchal dominance, thereby presenting melodramatic narratives of femme monstrosity. Although both protagonists attain narrative agency (such as defying death and time), the characters are denied conventional narrative catharsis of their main emotional motivation, anger. When confronted with deep-seated systemic privileges, it is not enough to be able to bring destruction to achieve a sense of justice. The anger of the Othered and marginalised as a fragile political force is not sufficient to transform unjust social systems, but the focalisation of injustice through this anger counters heteropatriarchal narrative scripts of silencing and delegitimization, when anger expression and knowledges of injustice are depicted as linked. In Stone Blind and The Faceless Old Woman, the heightened awareness of narrative conventions and the subversive narrative arcs of the characters create a tension that culminates in a compassionate portrayal of femme monsters and their anger and bring a disruptive paradigm change to their narrative universes and the ‘canon’ of these characters as monstrous retellings. The books relate their retrospective narrative of a transformational shift in self-concept to a position of narrative agency, aestheticized as emotional heightening and a meta-reflective narrative. Within this, time is both a key theme and central impetus for the formalisation of the books’ narrative elements on different DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 Politics of Anger in Narratives of Nonhuman Femme Monsters 151 spatiotemporal levels. Their non-linear narrativity creates meaning through juxtapositions, which enhances the reader’s perception of the narrative as led by the protagonists’ affects. The potentiality of social critique through subversion of narrative paradigms can only be realised in reading and discourse, but the novels themselves afford non-linear narrative temporality, which can enable diverse reconfigurations of the femme monster through their politics of anger (Matz 2018). Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2014a. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2004. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2014b. Willful Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Anderson, Willian Scovil. 1997. “Notes on Book Four”. In: Anderson, William Scovil, ed. 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Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1883. Treasure Island. London: Cassell & Company. Tatar, Maria. 2021. The Heroine with 1001 Faces. New York: Liveright. Traister, Rebecca. 2018. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. New York: Simon & Schuster. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0007 154 Laura Handl Challenging Anthropocentric Attitudes through More-Than-Human Narration in Monique Roffey’s Magical Realist Novel The Mermaid of Black Conch Emily Anderson Introduction In Monique Roffey’s 2020 novel The Mermaid of Back Conch, a unique form of more-than-human narration is introduced through the supernatural character Aycayia, a 2000-year-old cursed mermaid who is forcefully returned to land and influences the islanders’ ways of living. What makes this novel specifically interesting regarding the effect of the more-than-human is its magical realist setting, in which such fantastic creatures as the mermaid can effortlessly exist within our ‘reality’ and represent the more-than-human. Bernaerts et al. (2014: 70 ff.) claim that a more-than-human narrator may fulfil various functions such as creating satire, having a didactic purpose or emphasising ethical dilemmas. And while in other genres such as children’s literature, fairy tales, or fantasy, the presence of a more-than-human narrator “is not so exceptional in view of the relevant generic conventions”, in magical realism these fantastic more-than-human narrators most prominently create a deliberate ontological paradox when integrated into a realistic setting (71). In Roffey’s novel, the more-than-human narrator Aycayia is represented as realistic and neither challenged nor fully explained, leading the reader to encounter the supernatural paradox of the mermaid which undermines the rigidity of anthropocentric binaries such as animal vs. human and magical vs. scientific. This can, of course, be a tricky undertaking since the existence of the mermaid in an otherwise entirely realistic setting creates an impossibility which calls for explanation. Jan Alber et al. argue that anti-mimetic narration offers a possible approach to dealing with such a paradox. They use this term to describe narratives that DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 may have temporalities, storyworlds, mind representation, or acts of narration that would have to be construed as physically, logically, mnemonically, or psychologically impossible or highly implausible in real-world storytelling situations, but that allow readers to interpret them as reliable, possible, or authoritative by cuing them to change the interpretational strategies. (Alber et al. 2013: 104) Both the existence and the narrative perspective of the mermaid Aycayia are a challenge to the interpretative frames of the reader, since her immortality, her supernatural hybridity, as well as her sudden appearance in an otherwise entirely realistic setting, appear to be ontologically impossible. As Alber et al. aptly surmise, this causes the reader to develop new frames of interpretation to be able to encompass these impossibilities. Since the main supernatural element of Roffey’s magical realist narrative simultaneously represents the more-than-human, such an engagement I suggest, may prompt the reader to expand their awareness towards the more-than-human. Therefore, Aycayia’s more-than-human narrative perspective “aggressively challenges the mind’s fundamental sense-making capabilities”, “urges us to create frames that tran‐ scend our real-world knowledge […] [and] addresses the question of what these impossible blends say about us and our being in the world” (Alber et al. 2013: 109). Employing fantastic creatures such as mermaids, I suggest, can give rise to a re-evaluation of what it means to be human and what it means to be a human living in the Anthropocene and thus provoke a “responsible approach to living in the world that alleviates many of the problematic behaviours that have produced the Anthropocene” in the first place ( James 2019: 6). Therefore, this essay aims to explore the potentials as well as the limitations of destabilising anthropocentric attitudes based on binaries such as the animal vs. the human and the magical vs. the scientific by engaging with Aycayia’s supernatural presence and more-than-human perspective. Mermaids in the Anthropocene The mermaid is a monstrous, fantastic creature that has existed in cultures worldwide for millennia and has become an archetypal image branded into humanity’s collective imagination, reflecting both human desires as well as fears. We encounter mermaids in our everyday lives not only printed on the Starbucks coffee cup, which will end up as plastic waste floating in the ocean, but mermaids “have been used to market everything from bath salts to cigarettes, canned salmon and gourmet coffee but they have also been appropriated as powerful symbols of body positivity, feminist emancipation, and LGBTQ[+] empowerment” (Mortensen 2018: 204). Mermaids are creatures DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 156 Emily Anderson of the in-between. Living both in the ocean as well as occasionally on land, portrayed as alluringly innocent girls as well as volatile seductresses luring men to their deaths, they “inhabit a liminal space between the familiar and the foreign” (Robertson 2013: 307). However, no matter how the mermaid is portrayed throughout history and in different cultures, her “power to fascinate […] stems not only from her female gender but also from her uncertain species identity” (Mortensen 2018: 204). Their hybridity is what makes them both fascinating as well as estranging and unsettling, since they are neither entirely animal nor human and therefore neither entirely foreign nor familiar to humans. Especially the merging of the boundaries between the human and the animal makes mermaids particularly unsettling for anthropocentrism’s rigid binaries. By blurring human-animal distinctions, in other words, mermaids highlight the restrictiveness of anthropocentric ideology and signal the possibility of critically revisioning human being-in-the-world. In their improper cross-species corporeality and ontological liminality, mermaids carry the implication that human beings are themselves ‘composite creatures’, profoundly intertwined with other entities, despite the proud claim of autonomy made by the human race and each human self. (Mortensen 2018: 204) Mermaids, therefore, are the ideal fantastic half-half creatures to challenge the rigid binaries of the Anthropocene, described as the geological era in which humans “have become geological agents capable of shaping, in more and more profound ways, the very geology of the earth” (Monaco 2025: 9). And yet, while this description may initially sound neutral, the term has an inevitably negative connotation, since the era of the Anthropocene goes hand in hand with certain ideologies and attitudes that have led humanity to slowly but systematically destroy their own planet. Anthropocentric ideologies include the attitude of dominance over the more-than-human world and with it the assumption of an innate right to exploit its resources without consideration for the impact this has on the planet’s health and its human as well as more-than-human inhabitants. Ben Holgate emphasises the subconsciousness of the anthropocen‐ tric attitudes humanity struggles with, claiming that “[w]hile humans demand increasingly more of our planet and its natural resources, we remain largely ambivalent about nature, confused about the actual condition of the nonhuman, and often exhibiting contradictory behavior towards ecosystems, sometimes inadvertently harming the environments we attempt to protect” (2019: 26). This subconscious ambivalence can also be seen in Roffey’s novel in which the characters, even if they successfully empathise with the mermaid and gain a deeper understanding of the more-than-human, end up endangering DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 Challenging Anthropocentric Attitudes through More-Than-Human Narration 157 her by attempting to re-humanise her and to keep her on land. However, as “[m]ediators between land and sea, animality and humanity, mermaids may possess the monstrous power” to narrow the gap between the human and the more-than-human and thereby reveal and challenge the anthropocentric attitudes substantiated by such binaries (Mortensen 2019: 205). Narrative voices and perspectives The novel is told from multiple narrative perspectives. While the actual story takes place in the late 1970s, the narrative perspective changes frequently from an omniscient heterodiegetic narrator to retrospectively written accounts by two of the main characters, the fisherman David Baptiste and the mermaid Aycayia. David’s narrative sequences are told as diary entries from 2016, providing his memories of his relationship and experiences with Aycayia. Aycayia herself also provides a written account in the form of verse monologues, written at an unspecified later time, after David has already passed away. She explains how, as a creature of the ocean, she is able to write down her story: “I find a pencil floating from a boat / that was smashed on some rocks / I find paper in that wreckage / Long time events pass / and yet I can remember it all” (Roffey 2020: 53). On these pieces of paper, she paradoxically writes in a voice that is both simple and childlike due to her limited grasp of the English language as well as deeply insightful and reflective due to her millennia of living and experiencing both the human and the more-than-human world. Furthermore, Aycayia’s name literally translates to ‘sweet voice’ referring to her ability to sing for which she was well known in her Taino community, and which was also represented as a significant aspect of her allure on men. Her verse monologues, therefore, are reminiscent of both the oral traditions of Taino culture as well as the image of the singing siren whose song tempts men into the ocean. And yet, Aycayia is not the only more-than-human entity in the novel with a narrative voice. The ocean itself is anthropomorphised by the Black Conch fishermen and endowed with a cautioning voice that reminds them of the ocean’s agency. While fishing with the American tourist fishermen Thomas and Hank Clayson, a father and son from Miami, the local fisherman Nicer Country provides his impression of the ocean: The sea, that expanse of nothingness, could reflect a man back on himself. It had that effect. It was so endless and it moved around underneath the boat. It wasn’t the same thing at all as being on any expanse of earth. The sea shifted. The sea could swallow the boat whole. (Roffey 2020: 14) DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 158 Emily Anderson Nicer acknowledges the sea’s power, its Otherness from terrestrial soil which appears safe and firm compared to the volatile fluidity and contrariness of the ocean, which is anthropomorphised in the novel as a female entity that strikes fear into the hearts of men who want to dominate and exploit her. This type of “fluid metaphor bring[s] the porous boundaries between the human and the nonhuman to the fore” (Monaco 2025: 148). And yet, similar to the mermaid, whose representation is most often a reflection on humanity’s changing norms, attitudes, and desires, the ocean is said to “reflect a man back on himself ” (Roffey 2020: 14). How humanity chooses to portray and anthropomorphise these more-than-human entities reflects on their own fears and desires, such as the fishermen’s uncanny realisation that the ocean “could swallow the boat whole” and the uncomfortable experience of “the sea reflect[ing] back their very souls”, forcing these men to confront themselves and their relationship with the ocean (14). And yet, this representation of the ocean differs greatly depending on the perceiver. While the ocean may appear dauntingly powerful and uncanny to the human fishermen, Aycayia has a strong, intrinsic connection to the sea both from her previous life in the indigenous Taino culture she was born into as well as by her life within the ocean. For her, the sea means safety and power; for her the sea was “a silent but sentient world [and] she had come to love parts of it” (136). Furthermore, she can reflect on the differences and similarities between being human and being a mermaid, living on land and in the ocean. After several months back on land and returned to an almost human form, Acyayia begins to miss the sea: She missed the hiding she could do in it. She missed her tail. She had been a tremendous mermaid. But there was something in her old power that hadn’t come with her, that had fallen off with her tail. On land she was a small woman. In the sea, she had swum alongside whales. (163) The ocean provided protection, immortal life, and tremendous physical and magical power even though her original transformation into a mermaid was due to a curse placed on her by a group of women who had become jealous of Aycayia’s beauty and sexual allure. Aycayia’s hybrid mermaid body combines both the strength and instinct of a marine animal and the memories and consciousness of a human. She is described as a powerful and frightening mermaid rather than the timid, voiceless, and innocent version introduced by Hans Christian Andersen’s little mermaid. “Her torso was sturdy and muscular […] her spine spikes were flat […] but when they flared and spread, they revealed a mighty dorsal […] Her tail was curvaceous and strong and shot through with oily rainbow colours” (Roffey 2020: 30 f.). This power did not transfer to DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 Challenging Anthropocentric Attitudes through More-Than-Human Narration 159 her human form, “she already looked smaller than when she was in the sea” immediately after she was violently pulled from its waters (30). The ocean is portrayed as a sentient and powerful more-than-human entity with immense agency and influence on animals, humans, and supernatural, liminal creatures like the mermaid. And it warns the fishermen, both local and foreign: “Be careful what you ask for. I am bigger than you. Take only what you need” (14; original emphasis). “Science explains that we emerged from the sea - our blood a tide of oceanic ions […]. And yet our general obliviousness to the gigantic bodies of water surrounding islands and continents is astonishing”, surmises Yaeger (2010: 525). This obliviousness can be challenged and potentially lessened when confronted with the narrative perspective of both the ocean itself and a supernatural hybrid creature such as the mermaid. Fantasies of dominance The ocean’s warning, unfortunately, is not heeded by the fishermen who forcefully rip Aycayia from the sea. A blatant difference of anthropocentric attitudes is revealed between the local fishermen and the two foreigners, who become the object of Black Conch gossip as soon as they arrive to hire a crew of local fishermen as guides. “All agree they didn’t know Black Conch waters, let alone its ways. The old man, they say, had failed at everything he had tried in his life” (Roffey 2020: 13). Thomas Clayson lives in an unhappy, unfaithful marriage and brought his son Hank onto this fishing trip in hopes of “teaching him a thing or two about life, nature, even women, when they got drunk” (54). “His son was ‘sensitive’, his wife had said. Like a friggin plant”, an utterance that already suggests his disrespectful attitude towards the natural world, since he equates plants with fragility and weakness (19). As soon as an apparently strong and heavy sea creature gets hooked on Hank’s fishing rod, Thomas “wanted his son to catch the fish, wanted that more than anything on earth […]. Imagine the pride of having a son capable of such a conquest” (20). As it becomes clear to them that the creature they have captured was not in fact a blue marlin but a mermaid, the word ‘conquest’ takes on new meaning. Thomas Clayson wants for his son and himself to not only conquer nature in general but also the mermaid in particular, a “woman hooked, clubbed, half-dead”, and belonging to an indigenous culture that had been wiped out by the impacts of Western colonisation centuries ago (30). As she surfaces for the first time and the fishermen “saw her head, her breasts, her belly, the pubic bone of a woman where it met the tail of a glistening fish […] all five men were horrified as she hit the water, thrashing” (21). Instinctively, Nicer “knew they’d hooked something DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 160 Emily Anderson they shouldn’t have” and that “the mermaid, or whatever it was, deserved to stay in the sea” (21). But the two foreign tourists disregard the opinions of the local fishermen, who had grown up to be wary and superstitious but also respectful towards the ocean and the legendary creatures said to hide underneath its surface. While the local men “felt a sense of blasphemy” while hauling in the struggling mermaid, Thomas Clayson “could hardly wait to see her strung up on the jetty” (28). Even his son Hank, who had so far been rather frightened and hesitant towards the mermaid, reconsiders that “big game fishing was exciting after all” since “for the first time ever, he’d hooked a woman” (32). “The novel represents masculine violence […] [and] a mercenary lust for control” through the two tourist fishermen (Mentz 2025: 102), however, later in the novel several local islanders like David’s neighbour as well as several police officers will also display the same mercenary and violent behaviour towards the mermaid. During this violent extraction of the mermaid, she causes a variety of conflicting and juxtaposing emotions within these men. The local men are fearful and feel a deeply unsettling sense of wrongdoing while the tourist fishermen are set on conquering and exploiting the mermaid they pulled from the ocean. And yet, Thomas Clayson is well aware of the problematic aspects and the general unfairness of humanity exploiting nature for sport and to establish dominance over the more-than-human: “He’d caught many big fish and he understood, deep down, the nature of this game: that this was always an unfair fight. While there was skill to reeling in a game fish, there was no skill at all in the odds” (Roffey 2020: 28). And while there is a difference between the reactions of the local fishermen compared to the tourist fishermen regarding their relationship and attitude towards the ocean and its inhabitants, all men involved in the capture of Aycayia experience one feeling in common. “Every man could feel a sense of wonderment, at this half and half ” (30), and yet, accompanying this sense of awe is a derisive, abusive sexual desire to dominate the creature they had just violently captured. “Each man felt a deep tug in his crotch. The old man wanted to take out his dick and piss all over her. The younger men fought hard to keep a cockstand from bouncing up in their pants. She was like a magnet” (30). Their desire to dominate is twofold in Aycayia’s case: The men both experience the thrill of the chase in the hunting of an ‘animal’ they naturally assume they can overpower, and also the sexual desire towards the mermaid’s human female side. And while anthropocentric dominance must not necessarily be based on male sexual fantasies, in the novel’s context, Aycayia confronts the fishermen with the grotesque appeal of a creature both alluring and repulsive leading the men to attempt dominance over both her animal as well as her female body. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 Challenging Anthropocentric Attitudes through More-Than-Human Narration 161 In turn, Aycayia’s “eyes flicked over them, full of stark contempt” (30), a gaze that both frightens and provocatively challenges the men that captured her, since this fierce “nonhuman gaze […] correlates with uncertainty about human mastery over the animal in question”, challenging humanity’s assumption of self-evident superiority over the more-than-human (Armstrong 2025: 143). Changing perceptions towards the more-than-human So, in spite of the ocean’s ominous warning, the mermaid is taken on land and strung up on the jetty “alongside the two marlin for all to see, her head hanging downwards, her deadly hair trailing, her arms lashed with rope behind her back, her breasts naked” (34). David Baptiste, who had interacted with the mermaid several times up until this point by singing to her from his boat while admiring her appearance, saves Aycayia from the dock and temporarily places her inside a bathtub full of saltwater in his house. David, who spent his entire life living close to the sea and fishing its waters marvels at her strangeness, at “the face of a human woman who once lived centuries past” and the power and beauty of her animality (2). He is frightened but not repulsed and once they cautiously interact, David’s perspective begins to change: “She open my heart, one time, that mermaid, Lawd. She made my heart swell up in my chest, just like that. She open my mind, too, to other animals and fish we don’t know about” (9). David, instead of wanting to capture and abuse her, embraces her hybrid nature and reflects on the incredible “things a man could see, especially if he connect to nature, and live close to the sea” (9). For the next several weeks David witnesses Aycayia slowly returning to an almost human form, a magical transformation that is grotesque, painful, and frightening for both of them. Aycayia is cautious of David’s help due to her experiences with human men, and David, obviously, has no experiences dealing with a supernatural situation such as this. He attempts to make sense of her by assuming “she come from some half-space in God’s great order, like she was from a time when creatures were getting designed. She was from when fish was leaving the sea behind, growing legs, turning into reptiles” (10). A biological exception that was somehow left out of the evolutionary process of life moving from the ocean onto land is now going through this process in rapid procession when deprived of the ocean’s protection and power. “Her hands were the first to change; the webbing fell off in clumps, like grey-pink jello, to the floor […] the dorsal came of next, the spikes on her back had been dissolving […] it had begun to rot and turn gelatinous” (60 f.). Her animal body slowly dissolves, and David observes that this transformation is extremely unsettling to Aycayia. “One day, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 162 Emily Anderson I woke up early and found her tail on the floor. It was off, completely. Large and ragged and smelling not too good. I looked at her and she looked at me and I swear I saw that she was upset and maybe even miserable to lose it” (61). This empathetic assumption of David’s is seconded by Aycayia’s own account of her transformation when she writes: “[m]y new old self start coming back / I was a woman again and I was frighten bad […] One day my tail fell on the floor / all in one piece a big part of me / How could I swim away? ” (65 f.). For Aycayia, her mermaid body provided strength and protection; protection from the abusive sexual advances of men in both her past and present life on land, protection from the colonial violence which destroyed her people, as well as from the consequences of anthropocentrism which entirely changed humanity’s perception and attitudes towards the more-than-human world compared to the biocentric relationship Aycayia knew from her Taino culture. Though her existence in the sea is often referred to as a solitary existence and was the result of a curse placed on her by her own people, it nonetheless appears safe and tranquil in comparison to the struggles on land. Eventually, the anthropocentric attitudes of some of the characters engaging with Aycayia’s relationship with and representation of the more-than-human begin to change. Aycayia came “to Black Conch waters / on the currents with the leatherbacks”, moving with their annual migration cycle and orienting herself according to the natural movements of marine animals rather than a human understanding of time (53). Therefore, her attention to the changes of nature is much more pronounced. Especially during the time Aycayia is yet unable to verbally communicate, David as well as the white landowner Arcadia Rain and her deaf son Reggie notice Aycayia’s distinct attention to nature. Aycayia has developed her own way of communicating with the sea creatures around her and is only vaguely aware of the changes that took place on land over the millennia she has spent in the sea. “I lived in the kingdom of the sea for long long time”, she writes, [w]orld of silence but they talk down there in their own way […] For many years I live with fish Did not know how many centuries pass I see canoas get very big engines loud loud I stay away from them I see people in canoas who wear clothes I figure to keep away (Roffey 2020: 81). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 Challenging Anthropocentric Attitudes through More-Than-Human Narration 163 Once back on land, she struggles with contemporary society and the English language and for the first few weeks David and Aycayia rely on interpreting each other’s facial expressions and body language. While Aycayia is not entirely an animal, the first few attempts of communi‐ cation are reminiscent of a human attempting to interpret and empathise with the perspective of a frightened animal. “I try everything to make her feel safe”, David writes in his diary during the time he attempts to figure out how to help Aycayia during her transformation, experimenting with what to feed her and how to take care of the wounds inflicted on her during her capture (59). And yet, Aycayia is wary and agitated, going through emotional and physical turmoil, unwilling to allow David near her. However, while an actual animal perspective would involve a certain degree of anthropomorphising due to the inability of humans to truly know an animal’s cognitive and empathetic abilities and processes, Aycayia is a liminal, supernatural creature who was once a human cursed into a half-animal shape and is now neither one nor the other. Due to Aycayia’s supernatural more-than-humanness she can therefore be seen as a “bridge character” who “acts as a conduit between the readers and [animals]” ( James 2019: 593). “This [more-than-] human figure thus becomes the target of reader’s empathy on behalf of ” animals but “is not in itself anthropomorphised” (Caracciolo 2023: 92; original emphasis). The effect of this empathy for other animals which results from empathising with Aycayia’s half-half existence, quickly takes root in David. While cautiously exploring what Aycayia likes to eat, which turns out to be an entirely vegetarian diet, David remarks: “I lost my appetite for fish. I couldn’t eat nothing like that ever again - nor since” (62). As a fisherman living on an island that relies on fish as its main source of income as well as a major source of sustenance, this change is surprising and a clear result of David empathising with the marine animals he has caught and eaten his entire life after his interactions with Aycayia. And yet, this example also reveals the limitations of empathising with the mermaid as an approach to understanding and accepting the more-than-human, since David’s newly-acquired respect for the more-than-human is very much in consequence of his romantic emotions for Aycayia and her female, human side. While David certainly gains insight into the more-than-human world through engaging with Aycayia’s perspective, this is a result of him empathising with the mermaid’s humanness rather than her animality. So, the question arises if it is only possible for Aycayia to have such a noticeable influence on the other characters due to her humanoid form and her eventual development of human language? DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 164 Emily Anderson The influence of Aycayia’s communication This assumption is only substantiated by how strongly Aycayia’s influence on the other characters develops once her form of communication progresses from entirely non-verbal towards sign-language and eventually spoken English. Arcadia Rain, who functions as a local governor on the island, accidentally becomes aware of Aycayia and invites both David and the mermaid to visit her home after her deaf son Reggie takes a shine to Aycayia. Reggie can easily connect with the mermaid due to some shared struggles such as Reggie’s deafness as well as him being “half and half too / Half black half white”, while his mother Arcadia can relate to Aycayia’s struggle of belonging, since she is from a white, colonial family but was born and raised on Black Conch, a combination which has often led to her being an outcast in her own home (80). While, with a fully nonhuman narrator such as an animal, the communication with humans would be an obvious barrier, Aycayia, as both human as well as animal, can bypass this difficulty of nonhuman narration and achieve great impact on the islanders’ opinions as soon as she relearns verbal communication. Her attitudes and opinions actively begin to challenge some fundamental anthropocentric attitudes the characters represent, once more proving that humans are more susceptive towards a supernatural creature that looks and speaks like a human, making them more familiar and understandable compared to a nonhuman animal narrator. Miss Rain teach me the language of Black Conch island She say it was a type of English parlance She teach me like she teach Reggie her own son born with no language so we had that in common I had forgotten mine thousand year old language vanished from my mouth (Roffey 2020: 122) Arcadia Rain tells Aycayia that her family owns half of the island of Black Conch, their ownership dating back to the first European landand slave-owning settlers of Black Conch. Aycayia merely replies, “land is not to be owned I tell her”, thereby undermining the basis of the anthropocentric attitude of owning and exploiting land for personal gain (124). The mermaid has a different connection to the more-than-human world which both predates and transcends anthropocentrism. David romanticises Aycayia’s previous indigenous life, especially considering Aycayia’s marginal‐ isation and the curse placed on her by her own people, when he assumes that DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 Challenging Anthropocentric Attitudes through More-Than-Human Narration 165 she came “from ancient times, from times when people knew magic, when people saw gods everywhere and talked to the plants, the animals and even the fish in the sea” (70). Even though her people “made little distinction between human and animal … as a young woman, she had been cursed to cross the slight boundary between them” and come to terms with her liminality and her solitude in the ocean (222). And yet, though the memories of her previous life include the marginalisation she had to suffer due to her sexuality, she gradually reconnects to her old life on land by refamiliarising herself with nature, “she had recognised many things on the island: the smell of it, the night sounds, the type of daylight in the mornings […]. Then there were the birds and the plants, the trees all around, the warm earth; all of it flooded back, her world of living gods” (111). Aycayia’s memories of terrestrial nature predate Western anthropocentrism, originating in a culture that was able to live much more harmoniously with nature and whose religious and spiritual beliefs were founded on animism. These biocentric “indigenous philosophies stand in opposition to the Western, scientific, rationalist view of the natural environment as a site of exploitation for private profit and economic gain which is fundamentally separate from humanity” (Holgate 2019: 29). In addition, her experiences in the sea as part human, part animal provided her with the ability to represent the more-than-human world as a mediating figure between humanity and animality as well as between the land and the ocean. Thus, she undermines several anthropocentric ideologies such as the assumption of humanity to claim ownership over land and water and their resources as well as the anthropocentric necessity to maintain the animal-human binary, in order to justify the exploitation of animals and their habitats. Even though Aycayia’s supernatural existence was originally the result of a curse, to David it was “like she’d opened a door in the universe, showing him the first people who had lived long ago in these islands”, presenting him with an alternative way of living compared to the anthropocentric attitudes that most humans, including himself, have subconsciously internalized and are continuously acing upon (Roffey 2020: 105). Thus, Aycayia creates an alternative narrative for both the characters and the readers to consider and learn from, which brings humanity closer to an understanding of the more-than-human. By undermining the animal-human binary needed to justify the exploitation of animals and their habitats, rejecting the ownership of land which in turn condemns all forms of colonialism and even disturbing social binaries such as gender, ethnicity, and species identity, the mermaid can offer an alternative perspective, opposing common anthropocen‐ tric attitudes. “She had changed his comprehension of what it was to be human”, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 166 Emily Anderson David concludes, admitting that through her paradoxical half-half nature and her memories and attitudes which represent a time before anthropocentrism as well as the more-than-human world removed from anthropocentrism, he has re-evaluated his own humanness (82). Empathising with a more-than-human perspective such as Aycayia’s, even though this empathetic process does partly rely on Aycayia’s humanness rather than her animality, “inherently involves looking at the extratextual world from a different perspective so that readers are prompted to at least consider how they might adjust their lifestyles, both individually and collectively, to protect the environment and persuade others to do likewise” (Holgate 2019: 26). The storm’s impact Unfortunately, not all characters achieve a positive development and “as Aycayia comes to understand the island, she recognises that her hybridity, her fish-ness, exceeds what the human system can tolerate” (Mentz 2025: 101). The curse placed on her has only temporarily subsided and uncanny natural occurrences begin to accumulate towards the novel’s ending, warning of the inevitable return of Aycayia’s curse. While walking through the forest with Reggie, who introduces her to some of his favourite ancient trees, live fish start falling from the sky. “More fish cascaded. And then, an unmistakable cackle. The laughter of many women up the heavens. Then the sky opened. Hundreds of silver carite rained down through the trees” (Roffey 2020: 137). The curse cannot be reversed and finally Aycayia’s fish-ness returns, fine scales spreading on her skin like a rash and the webbing on her hands and feet grows back. While David frantically tries to keep Aycayia with him on land and in human form, she already knows there is no escaping her curse. David reflects in his diary: “I wanted to keep her safe, or so I told myself, but maybe I fool myself too; maybe ‘keep’ was the problem” (159). Aycayia belongs in the ocean, “the sea had never washed out of her”, and just as humans struggle to ‘keep’ and control nature, David realises that this possessive attitude is problematic and harmful towards Aycayia (196). Finally, the choice is taken away from both of them when David’s neighbour Priscilla reports the mermaid’s existence to the police, who in turn contact the tourist fisherman Thomas Clayson. Unable to stop the greed driving these characters to violently recapture the mermaid from David’s house and imprison them both until they can sell her to the highest bidder, Arcadia Rain and her returned lover Life Baptiste decide to help break them out of jail and return Aycayia to the ocean for her own safety. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 Challenging Anthropocentric Attitudes through More-Than-Human Narration 167 The concluding chapter describes the impact of the fictional hurricane Rosamund which sweeps the mermaid back into the ocean. This hurricane, which David describes as “just about the most devastating storm ever to hit Black Conch”, is not a normal meteorological occurrence, but the violent enforcement of Aycayia’s curse (224). David writes in his journal that this storm “was because of the mermaid. I’m sure of that. It came to claim her back. All during that time in the howling of the winds, I could hear those women laughing” (225). In this example, since the curse was originally placed on Aycayia by her fellow humans but now utters itself in a violent meteorological occurrence, human and (super-)natural agency merge to undermine the anthropocentric assumption of human superiority over nature. The hurricane “wipes the slate partly clean and creates new possibilities for the future”, ushering in a final opportunity for the characters to develop and change (Mentz 2025: 102). “Under cover of the storm, Aycayia returns to the sea, the Rain’s colonial house gets ripped from its foundations, Arcadia’s former lover decides to stay with her and their son, and the Yankee fisherman’s son admits his bisexuality to his domineering father”, Mentz aptly summarises the visible changes (2025: 102). However, characters such as Thomas Clayson, David’s neighbour Priscilla as well as the police officers who took part in the capture of the mermaid clearly have no interest in understanding the more-than-human, justifying their abusive behaviour by dehumanising Aycayia. “It wasn’t like he was selling one of his own people, she wasn’t from Black Conch. No. She wasn’t even human”, the police officer in charge of her capture justifies himself (Roffey 2020: 206). These characters have failed to empathise with Aycayia’s perspective and continue to intentionally hierarchise the human/ animal binary, perceiving her as more of an animal than a human, which, in their binary view of the value of the human over the animal would justify their treatment of Aycayia. This once again reveals the limitations of the novel’s anthropocentric criticism by using empathy for the mermaid in order to enhance an understanding of the more-than-human, since the characters who develop a positive relationship with her subconsciously focus more on her humanness and the characters whose perception remains negative justify this by focusing on her animal side, thereby partly maintaining the animal/ human divide. In the end, the devastating hurricane “was sweeping things away in its path”, revealing humanity’s ecological vulnerability through its destructive nature (Roffey 2020: 244). However, this was the storm’s “grand design, its meaning for them all”, ushering in possibilities for change and development which can now include more consideration of more-than-human perspectives and an awareness of how humanity, both consciously as well as DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 168 Emily Anderson subconsciously, maintains anthropocentric ideologies and how to potentially change such binary attitudes in the future (Roffey 2020: 244). Conclusion Aycayia’s supernatural presence and perspective sheds light on the difficult relationship between humanity and the more-than-human world, ultimately leading some characters to revise their anthropocentric attitudes and “learn[ing] what it means to be just one actor in an entangled world rather than the dominant being in a human-oriented hierarchy” (Fenske/ Norkunas 2017: 107). Since the mermaid appears in a magical realist novel in which her supernatural, more-than-human nature stands in tension with the realistic setting she is placed in, the readers are invited to make their own sense of her existence, thereby enabling a thorough individual engagement with her more-than-hu‐ manness. As Holgate suggest, “magical realism as a non-realistic form of writing enables the author to reveal interconnections that might not be perceptible through literary realism” (2019: 227). And yet, the novel also reveals the characters’ empathetic limitations and their tendency to foreground either Aycayia’s human or animal side in order to justify their respectful or abusive treatment of her. While it is understandable that humans tend to empathise more with what is familiar to them, this tendency still substantiates the binaries of human vs. animal, natural vs. magical, familiar vs. Other, that the mermaid allows to bridge in the first place. Aycayia does not define herself nor does she act according to an anthropocentric hierarchisation into binary categories, since she has never lived in an anthropocentric society, neither during her human life as an indigenous Taino woman nor as a supernatural liminal creature living in the ocean. However, the human characters’ reactions to her reveal how they, some more and some less intentionally, act in accordance with anthropocentric distinctions between such binary categories and that, even if they are willing to broaden their understanding of the more-than-human, they are still trapped within an anthropocentric worldview that limits their capacity for change. Nonetheless, characters such as David, Arcadia, Life, Reggie, and even Hank Clayson, though they subconsciously still rely on humanising Aycayia to better understand and empathise with her, gain substantial insight into the agency and perspective of the more-than-human world, resulting in formative and long-lasting changes in their attitudes towards their own existence in an anthropocentric world. Erin James claims that “we have told ourselves stories about the environment that permit and encourage destructive behaviour” and it has become increasingly important to “call for the exploration of new, more en‐ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 Challenging Anthropocentric Attitudes through More-Than-Human Narration 169 vironmentally responsible ones” (2022: 7). Supernatural creatures representing the perspective of the more-than-human world in magical realist fiction, “not only reflect on their specific realties but also create them” (Fenske/ Norkunas 2017: 106), thereby revealing and challenging the attitudes and ideologies humanity has subconsciously internalized and offering an alternative narrative to our current destructive anthropocentric reality. Works Cited Alber, Jan/ Iversen, Stefan/ Skov, Henrik/ Richardson, Brian. 2013. “What Really is Unnatu‐ ral Narratology? ”. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 5, 101-118. Armstrong, Philip. 2025. Disturbing Nature in Narrative Literature. New York: Routledge. Bernaerts, Lars/ Caracciolo, Marco/ Herman, Luc/ Varveck, Bart. 2014. “The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators”. Narrative 22/ 1, 68-93. Caracciolo, Marco. 2023. Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Un‐ stable Futures. London: Bloomsbury. Faris, Wendy. 2004. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Fenske, Michaela/ Norkunas, Martha. 2017. “Experiencing the More-than-Human World”. Narrative Culture 4/ 2, 105-110. Holgate, Ben. 2019. Climate and Crisis: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse. New York: Routledge. James, Erin. 2019. “Nonhuman Fictional Characters and the Empathy-Altruism Hypoth‐ esis”. Poetics Today 40/ 3, 579-596. James, Erin. 2022. Narrative in the Anthropocene. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Mentz, Steve. 2025. An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. New York: Routledge. Monaco, Angelo. 2025. Water Stories in the Anthropocene: Anglophone Climate-Change Fiction. New York: Routledge. Mortensen, Peter. 2018. “Half Fish, Half Woman”. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 29/ 2, 201-221. Robertson, Venetia. 2013. “Where Skin Meets Fin: The Mermaid as Myth, Monster and Other-Than-Human Identity”. Australian Religion Studies Review 26/ 3, 303-323. Roffey, Monique. 2020. The Mermaid of Black Conch. London: Penguin Random House. Yaeger, Patricia. 2010. “Editor’s Column: Sea Trash, Dark Pools, and the Tragedy of the Commons”. PMLA 25, 523-545. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0008 170 Emily Anderson Animal Perspectives Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman Wolfgang Funk ‘I share much more with a fox than with a fundamentalist’. (Charles Foster, Being a Beast) ‘Welch ein Tier. Wo es auch auftaucht, verändert es die Spielregeln’. (Katrin Schumacher, Füchse) Introduction: The animal other in the posthuman moment When Jacques Derrida famously saw himself being seen naked by his cat, and decided to use this encounter as a starting point to investigate humanness in terms of the animals that therefore we are, the conceptual framework of human-animal engagement changed for good. His eponymous essay is credited as the founding document of a particular strain of ‘animal studies’ in the literary and cultural field which attempts to, in the words of Payal Taneja, “interpret representations of animals in ways that do not reduce actual animals to symbols of abstractions or surrogates of people” (2013: 147). According to Derrida, human interest in animals has since the Enlightenment been shaped by anthropocentric ‘thinkers’ - Descartes’ cogito ergo sum comes to mind - that “neither wanted nor had the capacity to draw any systematic consequence from the fact that an animal could, facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a word, address them” (2002: 382; original emphasis). In view of his cat’s naked gaze, the “point of view of the absolute other”, Derrida experiences a necessity “to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor” (380) and an urgency to rise to the challenge of this unspoken and unthinking appeal and pursue “the other category of discourse, found among those whose signatories are first and foremost poets and prophets [who admit taking upon themselves DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 1 In “The Animal That Therefore I Am”, Derrida characterises this epistemological procedure as bêtise (2002: 399 f.), a “kind of knowledge that excludes real thinking” and an attempt “to master the world through a cataloguing of knowledge” (Weil 2012: xvi). the address of an animal that addresses them]” (383). Not unlike the spectres (of Marx) Derrida had invoked almost a decade earlier, the animals’ address, if taken seriously, necessitates a comprehensive realignment of our human epistemological and ontological coordinate system, and potentially enables “a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than a privation” (416). Animals constitute our sentient ‘other’ as they embody the nonhuman side of the culture/ nature divide that has shaped human positions within and towards the living world in Western cultural history. They differ markedly from ‘us’ in terms of presumably unique human features such as language use or being-towards-death. Unlike rivers, say, or birch trees, however, they also share some essential human properties like emotionality, sensibility and the capacity for suffering. By way of this uncanny (dis)similarity they are imbued with a demand to address the constitutive but undeterminable alterity inherent in any conception of subjectivity. Animals, as Matthew Calarco puts it, “might have a face, which is to say, animals might call upon and obligate me in ways that I cannot fully anticipate” (2008: 5), and Francesca Ferrando even extols this admission of the animal other into ourselves as a cornerstone for what she calls “Posthuman ethics [which] are established on ontological equanimity”, where “acknowledging ‘others’ - human and non-human being, organic and artificial, physical and noetic etc. - is (p)art of acknowledging ourselves” (2023: 32). If we understand posthumanism as an attitude concerned, among other things, with prospective relations in the living universe, the animal, like Derrida’s spectre, can be said to speak (without words) to “the ‘scholar’ of the future”; it forces us “to rethink the ‘there’ as soon as we open our mouths” (Derrida 1994: 176). Merely looking back and availing oneself of established categories of knowledge is insufficient. 1 Instead, the animal gaze for Derrida demands (without purpose) a transformative “other thinking of knowledge” (34; original emphasis) which aims not to describe, analyse or fix its object in its gaze, but which performatively “transforms the very thing it interprets” (51). In the words of Kari Weil, “it is only by deeply attending to animals, or, more precisely, by becoming ‘attuned’ to them […] that we may be able to think otherwise and overcome some of the limitations of our so-called rational condition” (2012: xvi). In my contribution, I will try to attune to the perspective of one particular animal, the fox, an animal which, according to Katrin Schumacher, changes DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 174 Wolfgang Funk the rules wherever it appears (2022: 15). I will investigate different literary attempts to invest the fox with the power to address the human animal and, by doing so, some of the central concerns in this our paradoxically posthuman Anthropocene, such as the blurring of boundaries between human and nonhu‐ man animals, the role language (still) plays in this renegotiation as well as the human effect of the shared environment. To do so, I will first provide a rough overview on how the ‘animal turn’ in literary and cultural studies and the subsequent establishment of animal studies maps onto the broader framework of posthuman thinking by showing how Derrida’s impulsions reverberate in the ideas of, among others, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway. After that I will turn to the fox and enquire what it is about this animal in particular that marks him out as such a potent figure to embody and epitomise above concerns, and more particularly, how acknowledging and addressing the vulpine literary gaze and voice can help us develop what Erica Fudge has called “an ‘interspecies competence’; that is, a new way of thinking about and living with animals” (2002: 11), the objective of which Richie Nimmo describes as showing “that mindedness, intentionality, subjectivity and self-hood, social communication, culture and complex cognition, are not exclusively human but distributed throughout multiple species” (2016: 22). Such a change in the human/ animal-paradigm would, according to Tobias Menely, place us in “the exemplary situation of ethics: to experience an injunction in the interruption of the very categories (self, human) that stabilize identity, to experience a claim irreducible to any categorical imperative, to be confronted with a decision for which there is no rule to follow” (2015: 39). In the second part, I will then examine a few selected case studies that feature encounters between and mergers of human and animal identities and exemplify the range of symbolic uses the fox is deployed for in these contexts. In Jasper Fforde’s allegorical novel The Constant Rabbit (2020), foxes feature as quasi-Über-humans who, endowed with speech and executive powers, help humans retain their anthropocentrism by warding off the ‘threat’ posed to this by a newly anthropomorphised rabbit population. In marked contrast, Sarah Hall’s short story “Mrs Fox” (2017) provides new ways of self-realisation for her female protagonist precisely by allowing her to turn into a fox, in the process shedding the patriarchal and (m)anthropocentric restraints of human language and behaviour, and eventually encouraging her human interlocutors to imagine for themselves alternative ways of being in the world. Finally, George Saunders’ devastating novella Fox 8 (2018) imagines most explicitly what it could look and sound like if the animal other could really address us. Composed in both broken and wonderfully innovative English, the letter addressed by the title character DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman 175 2 There is, I think, no adequate translation for Heidegger’s term. ‘Independence’, the word most frequently chosen, does not convey the ineluctable ‘thingness’ that distinguishes the Selbststand from the Gegenständlichkeit-of the object (Heidegger 2000: 168 ff.). 3 I use the term ‘figure’ here in the sense of Donna Haraway: “Figures are not represen‐ tations or didactic illustrations”, she claims in her seminal When Species Meet, “but rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another. For me, figures have always been where the biological and literary or artistic come together with all of the force of lived reality” (2008: 4). to humanity as a whole presents a thorough attempt to inhabit the suffering other of anthropocentrism. Taken together, these examples demonstrate that the fox has lost none of its fabled versatility to operate as, for or against the human and thus to act as a foil for the predicaments and quandaries humans might find themselves in at any moment in cultural history, and in particular so, at this our very own ‘posthuman moment’. Animal (studies) and the posthuman So how precisely does the ‘animal’, in its particular configuration as nonhuman, feature in contemporary attempts to think beyond the human? As outlined in the introduction to this volume, endowing animals with their own voice and acknowledging their incommensurable Selbststand  2 constitutes one major endeavour in the posthuman project of moving and thinking beyond an anthro‐ pocentric understanding of life, the universe and everything else. Overcoming “the central division between human and nonhuman animals that underlies much of Western thought” (Baker 2019: 6), is, it would seem, necessary for the “decentring of Anthropos” and would thus challenge “the separation of bios, as exclusively human life, from zoe, the life of animals and nonhuman entities” (Braidotti 2021: 112). In this context, the establishment of animal studies as a distinct field of cultural and literary engagement can be seen as an institutionalised inquiry into the ‘animal’ figure within the posthuman project. 3 Two main thrusts of this inquiry can be identified: on the one hand, animal studies provide a history and genealogy of the human/ animal divide in Western culture, which usually takes its departure from Aristotle, calling along the way at Genesis, Descartes, Kant and more often than not ending with Darwin and late Victorian debates around vivisection. In a grossly abridging summary, one could say that in most of these historical encounters, the distinctions between human and animal remain firmly in place, with any agency and power of determination safely residing on the side of Homo sapiens. This is reflected in the representation of animals. Cave paintings of horses, deer, aurochs and bears could very well DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 176 Wolfgang Funk 4 “I am not a posthumanist; ” Haraway declares, “I am who I become with companion species, who and which make a mess out of categories in the making of kin and kind. Queer messmates in mortal play, indeed” (2008: 19). A page further on, she accuses Derrida to have “failed a simple obligation of companion species; ” in view of his cat, “he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or constitute the primordial self-positioning of human as not being of the animal kind, as well as the taming in symbolic terms of the threats posed by it. The step from painting and thus trying to control this essential other in the real space of a prehistoric cave to fixing its place in the imaginary realm of language, and more specifically literature, is not a giant leap; Mario Ortiz Robles even sees “the speaking animal [as] literature’s founding invention” (2016: 145). Be that as it may, their role as the constitutive, and may be repressed, outside to what it means to be properly human leads Ortiz Robles to the startling claim that “animals are a human invention”, an invention no less without which any progress - if that is indeed the right word - in human culture and refinement would not have been possible: “I take the strict separation between human and non-human worlds to be a structural necessity for first positing, and then advancing, the idea of civilization”, he maintains (2016: 4). This inventory of human-animal relations in the past is, on the other hand, complemented by a vision of how to renegotiate and rethink such relations for a present as well as future posthuman world. Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am” represents the hinge which holds these perspectives together and separates them at the same time. His clever neologism animot, which he opposes to this traditional conception of ‘animal’ as “a word that men have given themselves […] in order to corral a large number of living beings within a single concept”, encapsulates and counteracts this (2002: 400). Kin to the spectre in Derrida’s thinking, animot signifies neither “a species nor a gender nor an individual [but] a sort of monstrous hybrid, a chimera” (409); it is that which always already lurks beyond the confines of linguistic signification, hovering “at the fringes of the narrative, representing everything that language cannot encompass” (Baker 2019: 4). From out there, it is prone to challenge the enclosures we have erected to hem in the endlessly variable and fundamentally unreadable animal other. It is precisely this oscillation and challenge of the animot as essentially defying the anthropocentric gaze which lay the foundation for animal studies being at the forefront of posthuman thinking and justify Cary Wolfe’s appraisal of Derrida’s text as “arguably the single most important event in the brief history of animal studies” (2009: 570). Donna Haraway, who - it should be said - both disavows Derrida’s animotl‐ istic sincerity and eschews the label of ‘posthumanist’ for herself, 4 suggests a DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman 177 perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning” (20) but instead “arrested that lure to deconstructive communication with the sort of critical gesture that he would never have allowed to stop him in his canonical philosophical reading and writing practices” (21). terminological framework in which to think anew this human-animal relation‐ ality. Based on the biological ‘fact’ that “human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body”, she first emphasises the essential meaninglessness of conceiving the human as being something categorically distinct from other lifeforms; more to the point, she declares exuberantly, “to be one is always to become with many” (2008: 3 f.; original emphasis). Rather than insisting on a static subjectivity of this our species as (the) one, she suggests, we should literally and metaphorical embrace our position as one (among) ‘companion species’ within a network of situated naturecultures, in which all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their some‐ times-joined, sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter (25; original emphases). It would behove us, in other words, not only to come to terms with the idea that we might not be quite as fully and unreservedly human as we might have thought but rather to entertain, accept, and indeed celebrate, the actuality that, pace Latour, nous n’avons jamais été humaines. Accepting these “challenges [to] the schema of the knowing subject and its anthropocentric underpinnings” (Wolfe 2009: 568) might even yield some emotional payoff and jouissance: “the sensibility of being-with-otherness”, Nimmo argues, produces “liminal intimacy [which] is predicated upon the maintenance of a tension between knowing and unknowing, familiarity and strangeness, in which intimacy consists in respecting, living with and even cultivating distance and alterity” (2016: 30, 33). The literary case studies which I will turn to in the second part of this essay all use the example of the fox to offer a variety of ways in which to imagine such liminal intimacy and, on occasion, even species companionship. Literature discourse, mainly in the shape of myths, fables and fairytales, has, of course, always been a space in which to imagine, or try out, such reconfigured relationships and species boundaries. There is no reason why this should not still hold true for our posthuman condition and moment. What unites us, according to Wolfe, is precisely “our subjection to and constitution in the materiality and technicity of a language that is always on the scene before we are” (2009: 571). All of this might leave one slightly baffled by the esprit de l’escalier of cultural history, that while language is often seen as the human claim to exceptionalism, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 178 Wolfgang Funk 5 “Unsere menschliche Unzulänglichkeit, uns die Welt in Sinneseindrücken zu rekon‐ struieren, steht einem Fuchs-Verstehen und überhaupt einem Tier-Verstehen unüber‐ brückbar gegenüber”. in that it establishes and maintains “the traditional (and highly questionable) dividing line between human and animal”, it might also function as “a privileged portal to the becoming-animal of the human” (Massumi 2018: 269). Liminal animal: The fox as creature and idea There are two main reasons for picking the fox as the animal at the focus of my case studies, and they broadly speaking reflect the two dimensions of contemporary animal studies outlined above. The first aspect pertains to the fox’s renown as a literary animal of long standing while the second has to do with the ‘actual’ zoological and physiological attributes of the species vulpes vulpes as encountered in our contemporary environment. Both, I will argue, converge on the fox’s liminal position, its haunting propensity to encroach upon human territory (in a literal as well as metaphorical sense), to be both alike and unlike humans at one and the same time, to symbolise simultaneously how humans (don’t) want to see themselves and their ultimate unknowable other. Foxes haunt humans in a very real sense. They follow us and they avoid us in equal measure. They are both synanthrope (Kulturfolger) and wary of humans, they are, in Timothy Baker’s words, “neither companion nor wholly alien” (2019: 77). They are evident indicators of the Anthropocene in that they transfer their habitat from the wild woods to the convenient city. Yet, at the same time, they elude us where they can and remain painfully secretive, arcane and mysterious. While, from Aesop’s fables via Reynard to The Little Prince and The Fantastic Mr. Fox, humans have tried to see the world through the eyes of foxes, their actual way of relating to the world is utterly impenetrable for us, as they operate on an entirely different perceptual register. For foxes, sight is not the primary sense impression. Instead, Charles Foster informs us, “foxes might get several years’ worth of information in a momentary sniff - so telescoping time” (2016: 205). Summarising the insurmountable disparity of human and vulpine perspective, Katrin Schumacher writes that ‘our human inadequacy to reconstruct the world in our sense impressions is irreconcilably opposed to the comprehension of foxes’ (2022: 29; my translation). 5 This circumstance, that they are and always have been around us but that we can hardly ever see them and emphatically cannot see like them, predestines the fox to be the glass darkly in which humans have seen themselves obliquely reflected. Their liminal and oscillatory existence “at the further edges DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman 179 6 For a detailed account of the history and contemporary state of foxhunting in Britain, see Marvin (2002) and Jones (2016: 139-187). 7 “Er ist dem Wesen nach ambig und mannigfaltig, nicht zweideutig, sondern mehrwertig [the German mehrwertig is impossible to translate adequately; WF]. […] Woher diese Liebe zum Fuchs? Es mag eine steile These sein, aber er scheint einen ziemlich guten Protagonisten für unsere dekonstruierte und hyperkomplexe Postmoderne abzugeben”. Baker likewise highlights the fox’s natural aptitude for postmodern structures of feeling: “stories of fox transformations are particularly interesting in the contemporary period”, he argues, “because of the way foxes challenge binaries between symbolic and experience-based interpretation, between wild and tame, and between living and dead” (2019: 77). of domestication, remaining wild as a species, even as they are routinely hunted for sport”, is according to Ortiz Robles, the main reason why the fox represents such “a symbolically rich site for staging the encounter between nature and civilization” (2016: 70). Notably so in Britain, where this encounter between nature and civilisation (in its broadest possible sense) has long been staged in a spectacle perceptively described by Oscar Wilde as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable” (1986: 87). 6 Influenced no doubt by this rich ‘cultural’ tradition and its all too obvious social, moral and economic implications, the British fox “has come to represent a thorny and emotive array of concepts to different people: from liberty to beauty, class to cruelty, hunter to hunted, pin-up to pest” ( Jones 2016: 5). In addition, the ambiguous qualities that have, since Aesop and La Fontaine, been conventionally associated with the fox - cunning yet supercilious, deceitful and manipulative but also endlessly charming - are “hardly commendable as models of social behavior”, but they mark foxes out as the literary animals per se, since they render them “ineluctably fascinating as well as eminently narratable” (Ortiz Robles 2016: 66). Being evasive and pervasive in equal measure, the fox, in its symbolic capacity, even withstands the vicissitudes of human cultural trends. Contrary to any expectation that “in a more enlightened, conscious and environmentally aware age, we would have evolved past anthropomorphising the fox” ( Jones 2016: 247), the fox - ‘in its nature indefinite and manifold, not merely ambiguous but multivalent’ - is, according to Schumacher, the definitive postmodern and, as I will try to show, also posthuman, animal (2022: 124 f.; my translation). 7 Literary case studies Literature, as Ortiz Robles reminds us, “helps us imagine alternatives to the way we live with animals, and animals help us imagine a new role for literature in a world where our animal future is uncertain” (2016: xi). In this capacity, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 180 Wolfgang Funk the literary engagement with animals can cater for what Karla Armbruster identifies as a deep-seated anthropological yearning for reaching beyond itself, for thinking beyond the human: “is it not possible”, she asks, that, running through every poem, novel, film, and silly news segment featuring talking animals, there is at least a trace of a desire to know and better understand the real otherness of animals, to uncenter from our human perspective and - in whatever limited way we can - open ourselves to the nonhuman? (2012: 3) At the same time, literary attempts to remap the “fabulous space and tension between the human perspective and the animal perspective” can provide the means and imaginary space for the animals’ emergence from their human-in‐ duced otherness (Danta 2018: 36). The literary foxes I will engage with in the remainder of this piece can be said to partake of this emergence. They embody one possible trajectory from postmodern deconstruction to posthuman companionship. They take Derrida, and with him all humankind, at his word(s) and subvert conventional human semantics and significations. Haunting human spaces and topoi, they render conventional language impossible and enforce their own terms. In doing so, they change the plot and reverse the traditional human gaze. They force us to rethink the function of literary representation as such and stipulate a possible solution to what Gillian Beer has described as “the central paradox for literature concerning itself with animals”, i.e. whether it can be “possible to be true to animal experience, […] if your medium of description is written human language? Will empathy be possible? ” (2005: 313; original emphasis). The animals in the pages of Fforde, Hall and Saunders all demand or embody such empathy and so actively reshape the foundational principles of their own representation. They impinge in various ways and by various means on human structures of signification. Language, however, is pivotal to all three of them: In Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit, foxes and rabbits can speak with humans on equal terms; they can effectively pass as humans, which makes the eventual impossibility of the species companionship and co-existence as equals even more striking. Hall’s “Mrs. Fox” reverses this perspective by turning her protagonist into a fox, with the attending cessation of communication symbolising the fact that species companionship probably works better when not acted out in language. Saunders Fox 8, finally, actively seeks the companionship of what he conceives of as his fellow human beings by appropriating their means of communication. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman 181 8 This is not the space to elaborate on the many contemporary political references to British politics and society in the novel. Suffice to say that Britain in Fforde’s year 2020 is ruled by a nefarious party called UKARP (UK Anti-Rabbit-Party), which under its current PM, named not coincidentally Nigel Smethwick, declares as its sole purpose the defence of the traditional human way of life against the encroachments of the apparently ever growing rabbit-population. Due to their famous lack of restraint in terms of procreation, so UKARP’s argument goes, the rabbits threaten to “kick off a LitterBombing campaign” that will eventually supersede humans and establish a society where their former betters will end up “working for a rabbit, taking orders from a rabbit, worshipping at their altar and living the lapine way - it’ll be lettuce for supper, dinner and tea” (Fforde 2020: 44, 89). Becoming human: Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit In Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit (2020), animals do not have to fight for their privilege to talk to humans on an equal footing. As a consequence of The Spontaneous Anthropomorphising Event, which had occurred precisely on 12 August 1965, 18 rabbits, 9 bees, 6 weasels, 5 guinea pigs, 3 foxes, a Dalmatian, a badger and a caterpillar “morphed and grew into a semi-humanlike shape”, which comes along with the instant mastery of human language (55, 84). From this seemingly silly and lightweight premise, Fforde develops a profound and very topical fable about social mechanisms of participation, exclusion and othering. 8 A tale in which, it needs to be said, foxes do not occupy centre stage. This is reserved for the rabbits, who are set up as the counterpart to the sectarian, nimbyistic, hateful and speciesist state-of-play. In the comely form of Constance (‘Connie’) Rabbit and her family, who have moved into the hitherto rabbit-free village of Much Hemlock, they come to embody the better angels of our human nature. The R/ rabbits’ laissez-faire lifestyle entails a love of literature - Rabbit and Rabbitability, “like Austen’s classic but more warren-based and with greater emphasis on ears, sex, carrots, burrowing and sex”, is in particularly high demand (6) - as well as an uninhibited, prolific and promiscuous sex life. This is based on their pre-Event organisation as a matriarchy, the language and ideology of which they seem to have aligned without too much friction to twenty-first-century forms of discourse: “You can take your ‘back to the burrow’ alpha-buck anthropocentric possessive misogynistic honcho machismo bullshit and shove it right up your pellet slot”, Connie suggests to her husband Doc at one point (186). On this basis, the rabbits conceive of life as “too short for hidden agendas, vapid posturing and mendacity” (104) and consequently find it hard to cope with their fellow human beings who are “trying to run a twenty-first-century world on Palaeolithic thoughts and sentiments” (300). In Fforde’s contemporary version of Britian, the rabbits clearly represent the utopian but finally unrealisable what-if scenario of a more equal and empathic, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 182 Wolfgang Funk 9 “Outre leur intelligence supérieure et leur respect de la nature, les lapins font preuve d’humilité et de sobriété, d’une franchise absolue, d’une intégrité sans faille dans leurs relations amicales, d’un hédonisme qui leur assure une sexualité épanouie, et préfèrent la raison au recours à la violence, sauf cas de force majeure”. and also sexier and more fun, society; “a country run on rabbit principles would be a step forward”, as one of the pro-rabbit human activists bluntly puts it (237; see also Derrien 2022: pr. 29). 9 The foxes, in this set-up, embody all the reasons why this vision of a better society will have to remain unattainable for the moment, the main obstacles be‐ ing residual structures of classism and elitism, as well as an ingrained proclivity for gratuitous violence. Elegantly transposing late-nineteenth-century notions of social decay through unlimited procreation among the lower echelons of society, Fforde endows his foxes with an acute sense of privilege and haughtiness by means of which they compensate for their comparative disadvantage in offspring: Owing to small litter sizes and an impenetrably long and complicated mating ritual that required Michelin-starred dinner dates and visits to Glyndebourne, foxes had not reproduced nearly as well as rabbits. From the two vixens and a dog at Event Zero there were now a shade under six thousand individuals. They had become increasingly urbane over the years and insisted on sending their cubs to public schools, quoting Latin in a fatuous and pretentious manner whenever possible and respelling their surnames with a dazzling array of ridiculous affectations. (2020: 85) The principal vulpine representative in the novel is Mr. Torquil Ffoxe, Senior Group Leader at RabCoT (Rabbit Compliance Taskforce), an agency concerned with keeping the rabbits in their geographical as as well societal place. Mr. Ffoxe out-humans the humans in zealously controlling the barriers that bar the rabbits from fully integrating into society and so becomes Fforde’s vehicle for demonstrating two seemingly contradictory anthropological constants. First, his use of wanton violence symbolises the main reason why the utopian rabbit way will remain an illusion: it is not that all humans would oppose the changes required to implement it, but that “a few are wired to be utter shits - and they tend to tip the balance” (237). At the same time, Mr. Ffoxe personifies the kind of structural violence against rabbits inscribed in and by the human conventions of law, which safeguard the suppression of the many by the few: When he publicly confronts Connie, who wards off his advances by way of pressing a knife against his throat, Mr. Ffoxe is only protected by a law that states that for every fox killed by a rabbit, a hundred rabbits are to be executed in retribution, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman 183 10 Eventually, even this protection will not save Mr. Ffoxe who is later on shot and killed by Connie when he invades her home and threatens her family. Her accompanying words “Sic semper tyrannis, you contemptible shit” both demonstrate that resistance is possible and that the rabbits themselves can, if they want to, quote “Latin in a fatuous and pretentious manner” (259, 85). 11 In one of his characteristic self-referential ploys, Fforde implicates himself and his author position with the linguistic habits of the ffoxes by the doubling of the initial letter of their names. Commenting on Jocaminca spelling her surname with two initial small ‘f ’s, Peter Knox - whose name, incidentally, rhymes with (f)fox (e) - takes issues with such displays of affectation: “as if having two ‘f ’s wasn’t pretentious enough” (276). Like the novel as a whole, this could be discounted as flippant and inconsequential shenanigans. It could, however, also be read as indicating that the linguistic foundations of anthropocentrism may not be quite as stable and incontestable as they appear to be, and that playful punning and transgression may be expedient in undermining them further. including the entire family of the perpetrator (157). 10 The rationale behind this legislation is based very much not on human dispositifs but on traditional role ascriptions taken from the animal kingdom: “At the High Court in 1978”, we are told, “Fox v. Rabbit established that a fox killing a rabbit - while taxonomically a fox - was legally defensible on the grounds of ‘long-founded predation of historically natural prey’” (86). Accordingly, so Mr. Ffoxe informs Connie, there is by natural law always “hunter and there’s hunted. It’s the way of things” (156), thereby enshrining that “the bold and righteous anthropocentric path” of Social Darwinism is to be maintained (20), even and especially when being challenged by alternatives models of species companionship. These two forms of violence, individual and systemic, are brought together in a scene where Mr. Ffoxe tortures Peter Knox, the well-intentioned but ultimately hapless human narrator of the novel, who is in custody for conspiring with the rabbits. After thumping Peter’s head repeatedly on the table, Mr. Ffoxe tells him that “The first was to make the point […] that if you double-cross me I will find you, wherever you are, and make good on the whole eye-coming-out-and-eating-it scenario. The second was for betraying your own species”. “And the third? ” I asked. “That one”, he said, leaning closer to whisper in my ear, “was simply for pleasure’. (245) In short, the foxes in The Constant Rabbit exemplify the fact that anthropo‐ centrism is not mainly an interactional attitude which concerns individual encounters with and representations of animals. In spite of their power within the system, the foxes ultimate remain useful idiots, and they know it: Jocaminca fforkes, Mr. Ffoxe’s successor as Senior Group Leader, 11 at least harbours no DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 184 Wolfgang Funk 12 “Fforde ne valide pas plus les normes qu’il ne les rejette, mais expose avec humour leur caractère intrinsèquement arbitraire, voire absurde” (2022: pr. 47). illusions about their role within the grander scheme of things: “We’ve only been invited to top table to do the dirty work”, she concedes, “and if things will go tits-up - which they eventually will - there is a convenient bogeyman at which to point the finger. Human guilt, as always, will be abrogated to foxes, or circumstance, and eventually to history” (290). This shows that the logic and structures of anthropocentrism are so deeply engrained in human systems of ordering and administrating the living universe that they even withstand and can incorporate creatures - like Fforde’s rabbits and foxes - who succeed to all intents and purposes in becoming-human themselves. Human society as depicted by Fforde is not yet ready to embrace post-anthropocentric posthumanism, with moments of true kinship confined to individual acts of sympathy. One of these comes when Peter, after having had his thumbs removed to symbolise his ‘betrayal’ of the human race, locks hands with Lance, the rabbit lawyer who will represent him in court: “I squeezed his two paws with my two thumbless hands. It actually felt more comfortable and connected, as though our hands/ paws interlocked more fully and completely, and with them an understanding” (286). Such instances of companionship while they may momentarily bridge and transcend “the species divide, joining creatures in common felicity”, are not enough, though (Menely 2015: 2). Nevertheless, Fforde’s novel is not just a fable which - in the tradition of Animal Farm - turns animal into humans in order to decry the inhumanities of a society at a given point in time. Nor does it merely reveal and lampoon the intrinsic arbitrariness of social norms as such, as Stanislas Derrien claims. 12 On top of this, I would argue, Fforde’s anthropomorphised rabbits and foxes prompt a rather bleak conclusion with regard to any posthuman attempt at species companionship. Supported as it is by human-made concepts and traditions, this apparently playful fable suggests, anthropocentrism is bound to survive even the onslaught of posthumanism. Consequently, the rabbits’ final act of reversing the Spontaneous Anthropomorphising Event and becoming ‘mere’ rabbits again - as a parting shot taking the foxes with them back to animality - amounts to a collective shrugging of the shoulders. “It’s not working out for us, Pete”, Connie rather heartbreakingly concedes before she departs, “driving cars and talking and having TV was kind of fun, and clothes and eating out totally rock. But the hate, the fear, the greed. It just doesn’t make any sense” (300; original emphasis). For better or, much more likely, for worse, humans are left to and with their DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman 185 13 Focusing on instances of such ‘events’ in Hall’s short fiction, Ana Raquel Fernandes argues that often “the event in Hall’s work is linked to an occurrence involving an animal, reminding readers of the inseparability of both human and animal life” (2020: 156). 14 This aspect is the main focus of Richard Garnett’s 1922-novel Lady into Fox, a text which serves as Hall’s explicit inspiration and which is repeatedly referenced throughout “Mrs. Fox”. As Michael L. Ross shows, both texts “draw on the tradition of the beast fable for a framework within which to question ‘civilized’ assumptions by exposing them to the potency of ‘wildness’ incarnated in the marauding fox” (1985: 229). Like Hall’s Sophia, Garnett’s protagonist Silvia escapes from a conventional marriage “in which her natural, animal core is hunted and captured” by spontaneously turning into a fox (Gilead 2022: 403). Abandoning her willing but uncomprehending husband and “the human life altogether”, Ann-Sophie Lönngren argues, is for Silvia the only way to overcome “the patriarchal regimes under which they both live” (2023: 487). own devices and society has missed its chance of attuning to a more humane rabbity way of relating to one another. Becoming vixen: Sarah Hall’s “Mrs. Fox” While Fforde thus paints a disheartening picture of animal agency and the possibility of posthuman species companionship, the other two tales I will focus on endow their foxes with greater powers of intervention. Sarah Hall’s “Mrs. Fox” (2017) starts out from a reversed premise than that in The Constant Rabbit. In what could be described as a de-anthropomorphising event, 13 Hall lets her protagonist Sophia shed her human form and features and turn into a fox. There are two aspects to this metamorphosis that I would like to explore in more detail: the notion, on the one hand, that becoming-fox offers an escape from anthropological, meaning patriarchal, conventions, 14 and the consequences, on the other, which this breakout has for established forms of human interaction and understanding. That Sophia does not feel entirely comfortable and at home in her human skin is insinuated from the very start. After having had sex with her husband in their functional suburban home, her animal imagination breaks forth for this first time, as “she dreams subterranean dreams, of forests, dark corridors and bur‐ rows, roots and earth” (3). As with the rabbits’ unfettered and unreconstructed sex life in Fforde’s novel, sex in “Mrs. Fox” seems to presage an alternative form of interaction in which human conventions can be momentarily suspended, and which allows “Sophia’s corporeal, animalistic identity [to] come to the fore” (Ditter 2019: 191). When she writes how Sophia “indicates her willingness” and how the couple “move upstairs and reduce each other to nakedness” in the build-up to their sexual act, Hall describes them in strangely animalistic terms (2017: 5), a first instance of uncertain species ascriptions which reminds us of DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 186 Wolfgang Funk Derrida’s insight that “the property unique to animals and what in the final analysis distinguishes them from man, is their being naked without knowing it” (2002: 373). Sophia’s nakedness here, marked by a “wide badge of hair, undepilated, spread[ing] at the top of her thighs” (Hall 2017: 5), foreshadows her eventual transmutation into a ‘real’ fox, an event which Hall symbolically stages as both a running away from the civilised circumspection of her static human habitation this far and a running towards and embracing of (her) nature, as the red of the sunset merges with the “red of her hair and her coat falling, the red of her fur and her body loosening” (9). This shedding of the clothes and conventions that mark her as human reminds us of Derrida’s claim that “dressing oneself would be inseparable from all the other forms of what is proper to man, even if one talks about it less than speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift, and so on” (2002: 373). The “thousand feral programmes” (Hall 2017: 10) kicking in with Sophia’s becoming vixen do not signify a reversal of kind but rather an external confirmation of an always already inherent disposition. Along similar lines, Baker underlines how her metamorphosis constitutes “not a process of moving between one stable state and another, but of challenging the stability of given identities”, undermining in one fell swoop any kind of “patriarchal and anthropocentric superiority” (2019: 80, 83). Consequently, the challenge enacted in Sophia’s transformation not only destabilises the identity categories of human and animal but also the signifying practices by which these categories are kept in place. Sophia’s unnamed husband can neither paraphrase what happened to his wife in terms of illness, nor does cultural and literary history, in the form of traditional fables and other tales of “transmogrification” provide him with a template. Thus unable to “avail himself of understanding, reason, definition”, he is forced to re-assert the relative merit of such human forms of meaning-making: “is it she or he who is lost”, he wonders (16). Bereft of the mechanisms by which to order his world and confronted with the sheer animal nakedness of his wife, her husband’s own approaches to and means of communication become useand meaningless: “He cannot speak to her anymore”, we hear; “she doesn’t understand and his voice sounds ridiculous to his own ears, a cacophony” (17). It is to his credit that - unlike his literary predecessor in Lady into Fox - he accepts the loss of his wife, who he realises “doesn’t want to come back, that perhaps she did not want what she had”, as well as the inadequacy of his own anthropocentric worldview (20). On the way to this realisation he even attempts to put himself in her position, pondering “what alien sights” she might be seeing (14). This can be seen as at least an DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman 187 attempt to follow Derrida’s appeal to look at the world from a perspective other than that of anthropocentrism. Both The Constant Rabbit and “Mrs. Fox” end with the acknowledgement of a failed relationship. Both - though in breach of clear species demarcations - are depicted as heteronormative, illustrating perhaps how traditional androcentric gender ascriptions uphold anthropocentric thinking. But while the improbable liaison between Peter Knox and Connie Rabbit eventually flounders on the incompatibility of the different species and denotes the unrealisability of truly posthuman companionship and understanding, “Mrs. Fox” suggests that such understanding might be conceivable and “invites us to look across the epistemological divide between humans and animals to develop a new ethic for approaching animal others” (Ditter 2019: 189). Such a reading would go beyond the story’s assessment as merely “a modern fable of women’s empowerment” which relates how Sophia “deviates from the traditional route of married life, taking control of her body and sexuality and breaking with societal norms and expectations” (Fernandes 2020: 163 f.). It would likewise seem to contradict Baker’s pessimistic reading of the husband’s attitude, who claims that if “the husband does not fully know or understand his fox wife, he also never knew or understood his human wife” (2019: 88). Quite the opposite is true I think. Conceding that “her new physical form requires a different relationship with the world” (86), and reluctantly letting go both his wife and reason, the husband displays a certain degree of Fudge’s “interspecies competence” (2002: 11) and maybe represents the true posthuman ‘hero’ of this piece in so far as he realises that Sophia has always already eluded conventional frames of reference and understanding. He thereby acknowledges the creaturely Selbststand of his former and now “unbelonging wife” (Hall 2017: 28), in doing so paradoxically enacting the first step towards species companionship. Addressing human: George Saunders’ Fox 8 While both Fforde and Hall put the boundaries between humans and foxes to a test in their respective texts, George Saunders’ Fox 8 leaves this demarcation line thoroughly in place. The foxes remain foxes throughout and no humans transform into anything other than human beings. Nevertheless I would argue that Saunders’ little book constitutes the most powerful renegotiation of the relationship between human and animal of my three case studies. It does so by heeding most explicitly of all Derrida’s exhortation to take serious the spectral address of the animal other. Although the eponymous narrator of the story is DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 188 Wolfgang Funk 15 For detailed accounts of animal narrators in literature, see Cosslett (2006), McHugh (2011), Armbruster (2012) and Bernaerts et al. (2014). by no means the first animal narrator in literary history, 15 Fox 8’s attempt to talk sense into his human interlocutors is exceptional in the way it combines the instrument and acquisition of this address (his idiosyncratic voice) with the issues being brought forward (human violence against the environment). In the following, I will look at both of these in turn. Unlike the rabbits and foxes populating Much Hemlock in The Constant Rabbit, Fox 8 has to actively acquire the means of being able to talk/ write back to humanity. One day “walking neer one of your Yuman houses”, he relates how he happened upon “the most amazing sound […]: the Yuman voice, making werds” (3). The ‘werds’, it turns out, are bedtime stories read by a “lady in that house […] to her pups, with ‘luv’” (4). Intrigued he returns “nite upon nite, seeted upon that window, trying to lern” both human language and behaviour (4). It is probably no coincidence that this process of gaining cross-species knowledge and competence resembles that of Frankenstein’s creature nightly listening in on the DeLacey family. Using their marginal perspective - looking in from the outside - on humanity, both equip themselves with the conceptual and linguistic wherewithal to challenge fundamental principles on which this very marginal position is founded. Since all of his language acquisition occurs via spoken words, the discourse Fox 8 uses frequently defies conventional spellings and grammar of written English: he is, for instance, “fast and nated” by the “werds” he hears and desires to “understand them total lee” (3 f.). At the very start, Fox 8 apologises for this apparent misperformance - “First may I say, sorry for any werds I spel rong” - not without, however, emphasising that his mastery of human language does not in any way interfere with his self-confident identification as a nonhuman animal: “Because I am a fox! ” (3). The effect of Fox 8’s very particular vernacular on the reader is quite complex. On the one hand, the conceptual simplicity and conversational tone he adopts suggests that Fox 8 may himself be akin to those cute storied animals which, in all likelihood, populate the bedtime stories with which the human ‘pups’ are regaled on the other side of the window, in other words that this is another mildly amusing and mildly educational fable, a misconception, as we shall see, which renders the intrusion of violence later on even more drastic and unpremeditated. Considering how many ‘difficult’ words and abstracts Fox 8 is actually able to use and apply correctly, there is also the distinct possibility that this innocence and naivety may be merely a posture, or a narrative ploy. He knows the power of stories very well, so we should not put it beyond him that he DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman 189 uses the contrast between his innocuous narration and the brutality of the story to deliberate effect. Moreover, and more in line with the posthuman challenges to anthropocentrism which this volume is generally concerned with, Fox 8’s language does require the reader to adjust their own linguistic competence. Forced to align their knowledge of correct spelling and syntax with that of Fox 8’s usage, readers perform their own implicit challenge to the ‘language barrier’ conventionally thought to separate human from nonhuman animals. In this light, the initial address of us as “Deer Reeder” (3; emphasis added) may not just be a careless orthographic mistake but a deliberate and purposeful categorical error. The more effective challenge posed by Fox 8 to ideas of human superiority, however, does not come in how he writes, but precisely when he finds himself lost for words. Reared as he is on the love and bedtime stories he encountered through the window, he initially conceives of humans as utterly amiable and pleasant. “It made me feel gud, like Yumans cud feel luv and show luv”, he proclaims, adding - on a more global register - that this made him “hope full for the future of Erth” (4). This hope is not sustained, though. Actual ‘Yumans’, it turns out, are not the stuff of fairy-tales and fables. Rather, they are out to destroy his and his fellow foxes’ habitat and livelihood. They are building a huge “Mawl”, for example, in which process they “dug up our Primary Forest! They tore out our Leaning Tree! They rekked our shady drinking spot”, with the result that “all the things we luv to eat, such as Bugs, such as fat slow Mise, are total lee gone” (10 f.). Still hopeful about general human intentions, Fox 8 is unable to read this mauling mawl/ mall, which - adding insult to injury - is called FoxViewCommon, as the symbol of the ruthless human exploitation of their natural environment that it actually is. Instead he sees it as an opportunity, a gift even. The mall’s “Fud Cort” may be just what the foxes need now: “If there is fud, it shud be fud for all, rite”, he hope full lee argues (19). Joined by his best mate, Fox 7, he sets off on reconnaissance, and here his misapprehension of the human character has fatal consequences. Their first impression of the mall is of utter delight, however, as they encounter inside FoxViewCommon a human-made paradise of “Fake Rox”, “Reel Trees” and plenty of food, “splender”, in short, “no Fox cud curate” (27 f.). Together, Foxes 7 and 8 indulge in a vision of species companionship which would tear down all boundaries: We were so happy we sat between those Fake Rox, speaking dreemy lee of our future, such as: We wud get some pants and glases. We wud ride in a Kar, plasing a coffee on are breefcase. We wud make such gud frends with the Yumans, they wud cut a Fox Dore in there Mawl. (28) DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 190 Wolfgang Funk 16 While this random act of violence might seem unmotivated in terms of the story here, it is, unfortunately, not without real-life precedents. In her book Foxes Unearthed, Lucy Jones interviews an employee with a pest-control company called ‘Rentokil’ who tells her how one day “he received a call from a Rentokil surveyor who said a fox cub was being stoned to death by builders on a building site in Romford, Essex. […] He arrived at the scene and saw a fox cub, so young and tiny it could fit inside a pint glass, lying in a ditch, being tortured by a group of men” (2016: 113). It is not to be, however. Leaving the mall with the thrill of anticipation of telling their fellow foxes about this newfound land of plenty, the two foxes encounter two construction workers and use this opportunity to express their gratitude: “hello frends, we have just seen the wunder that is your Mawl, we congratulate you! […] You are so nise! What a grate day for the Fox/ Yuman connection” (30). Not quite so grate, unfortunately. One of the workers takes off the helmet he is wearing, which Fox 8 mistakes as a fellow greeting in return: “I woslike, in my brane: It must be a form of saloot? So did Fox saloot back, which is: reach out with front legs, bow, yawn” (30). What the worker actually does with his helmet is hurl it at Fox 7, knocking him out, upon which he is kicked and further mauled until finally “the small Yuman pikked up Fox 7, now ded, and flung him threw the air” (32). 16 The matter-of-factness with which Fox 8 conveys this scene and the death of his friend illustrate not only that any utopian dream of species companionship was premature and unreservedly misplaced but also that he lacks the ‘proper’ words, phrases and mindset to conceive of such gratuitous cross-species violence. His loss for words runs much deeper, though. His bafflement about why “the Curator [did] it so rong, making the groop with the gratest skil the meenest” (38) leads to his literally getting lost in the in-between zone between his ‘native forest’ and “a Yuman zone” which comprises “RiverWalkEstates, along such rodes as Hummingbird Way and Slow Stream Avenue” (37). Having lost his plot, he is unable to even find his old skulk. “If this was a buk”, he comments, “all it wud take is Guts, and I cud have done it. But no. It was reel life” (41). The stories he heard and the story he finds himself forced to tell do not align, and this, deer reeder, “is why I am riting this leter to you Yumans” (44). (Awaiting) Conclusion Having had his high hopes of human magnanimity and species companionship comprehensively dashed, Fox 8 does not accept this outcome as inevitable, though. Unlike Fforde’s rabbits, who shrug of humans as basically unfit for purpose and rather forego entirely a companionship based on linguistic and DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman 191 social misunderstandings, Fox 8 gives humans a chance to come clean. And he knows that while we may tend to accept or endure bad news in ‘reel life’ (news about climate change, violence against marginalised groups, exploitation and killing of animals), “you Yumans like your Storys to end happy” (49; emphasis added). His effort of ‘lerning’ the ways and words of the ‘Yumans’, of thus passing as human to an extent, enables Fox 8 to put into words the plea Derrida recognised in the silent gaze of his cat, “of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be” (2002: 416) which would change the story of nature’s anthropocentric violence and misuse: “If you want your Storys to end happy”, Fox 8 instructs us, “try being niser” (Saunders 2018: 49). Explaining why humans have used and are using their power to subjugate their fellow species, this implies, would be a first step towards a posthuman species companionship that is worth its name, but this onus must be shouldered by the humans. What literary animals can do in this context is imagine and act out potential forms of this rapprochement, encounters which may sometimes end in failure, as in The Constant Rabbit, or result in a complete abdication of humanness, as in “Mrs. Fox”; or which can offer or trigger, as in Fox 8, a new form of language, one fit for a proper dialogue across species: “I awate your answer. Fox 8” (49). Works Cited Armbruster, Karla. 2012. “What Do We Want from Talking Animals? : Reflections on Literary Representations of Animal Voices and Minds”. In: DeMello, Margo, ed. Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing. New York: Routledge, 1-17. Baker, Timothy C. 2019. Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Beer, Gillian. 2005. “Animal Presences: Tussles with Anthropomorphism”. Comparative Critical Studies 2/ 3, 311-322. Bernaerts, Lars/ Caracciolo, Marco/ Herman, Luc/ Varveck, Bart. 2014. “The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators”. Narrative 22/ 1, 68-93. Braidotti, Rosi. 2021. “Posthuman Feminism and Gender Methodology”. In: Browne, Jude, ed. Why Gender? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 101-125. Calarco, Matthew. 2008. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press. Cosslett, Tess. 2006. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786-1914. Aldershot: Ashgate. Danta, Chris. 2018. Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 192 Wolfgang Funk Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. 1993. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York/ London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”. Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28/ 2, 369-418. Derrien, Stanislas. 2022. “‘While humanlike, they are not actually humanful’: Hybridité et Normativité dans The Constant Rabbit de Jasper Fforde”. Motifs 5, prgs. https: / / mot ifs.pergola-publications.fr/ index.php? id=694. Ditter, Julia. 2019. “Human into Animal: Post-anthropomorphic Transformations in Sarah Hall’s ‘Mrs Fox’”. In: Korte, Barbara/ Lojo-Rodriguez, Laura Ma, eds. Borders and Border Crossings in the Contemporary British Short Story. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 186-204. Fernandes, Ana Raquel. 2020. “Transgression and Empowerment in Sarah Hall’s Short Fiction”. American, British and Canadian Studies Journal 35/ 1, 152-172. Ferrando, Francesca. 2023. The Art of Being Posthuman: Who are We in the 21st Century? Cambridge/ Hoboken, NJ: Polity Press. Fforde, Jasper. 2020. The Constant Rabbit. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Foster, Charles. 2016. Being a Beast: An Intimate and Radical Look at Nature. London: Profile Books. Fudge, Erica. 2002. “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals”. In: Rothfels, Nigel, ed., 3-18. Garnett, David. 1922. Lady into Fox. London: Chatto & Windus. Gilead, Amihud. 2022. “How Is a Metamorphosis of a Lady into a Fox Possible? A Philosophical Comment on David Garnett’s Lady into Fox”. Philosophy and Literature 46/ 2, 398-414. Hall, Sarah. 2017. “Mrs. Fox”. Madame Zero. London: Faber & Faber, 1-28. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2000. “Das Ding”. 1954. In: Gesamtausgabe. Band-7: Vorträge und Aufsätze, Frankfurt/ Main: Klostermann, 165-187. Jones, Lucy. 2016. Foxes Unearthed: A Story of Love and Loathing in Modern Britain. London: Elliott and Thompson. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. 1991. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cam‐ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lönngren, Ann-Sophie. 2023. “Reading transformations: from David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922) to Sarah Hall’s ‘Mrs. Fox’ (2013)”. European Journal of English Studies 27/ 3, 483-496. MacCormack, Patricia. 2020. The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthro‐ pocene. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Marvin, Garry. 2002. “Unspeakability, Inedibility, and the Structures of Pursuit in the English Foxhunt”. In: Rothfels, Nigel, ed., 139-158. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 Spectres of Fox: Vulpine Perspectives and the Posthuman 193 Massumi, Brian. 2018. “Becoming-Animal in the Literary Field”. In: Boehrer, Bruce/ Hand, Molly/ Massumi, Brian, eds. Animals, Animality, and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 265-283. McHugh, Susan. 2011. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Menely, Tobias. 2015. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. Chi‐ cago/ London: The University of Chicago Press. Nimmo, Richie. 2016. “From Over the Horizon: Animal Alterity and Liminal Intimacy Beyond the Anthropomorphic Embrace”. Otherness: Essays and Studies 5/ 2, 13-45. Ortiz Robles, Mario. 2016. Literature and Animal Studies. London/ New York: Routledge. Ross, Michael L. 1985. “Ladies and Foxes: D.H. Lawrence, David Garnett, and the Female of the Species”. The D.H. Lawrence Review 18/ 2, 229-238. Rothfels, Nigel, ed. Representing Animals. Bloomington, IN/ Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Saunders, George. 2018. Fox 8. London: Bloomsbury. Schumacher, Katrin. 2022. Füchse. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. Taneja, Payal. 2013. “The Tropical Empire: Exotic Animals and Beastly Men in The Island of Doctor Moreau”. ESC 39/ 2, 139-159. Weil, Kari. 2012. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York: Columbia University Press. Wilde, Oscar. 1986. “A Woman of No Importance”. 1893. In: The Importance of Being Earnest and other Plays. London: Penguin, 73-144. Wolfe, Cary. 2009. “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities”. PMLA 124/ 2, 564-575. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0009 194 Wolfgang Funk 1 Jacques Derrida. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am, p.-6. Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry Irmtraud Huber “An animal looks at me” 1 In a foundational scene of critical animal studies, a man feels the gaze of a nonhuman animal on his naked body: Derrida recounts in the beginning of The Animal That Therefore I Am his affective reaction to his encounter with his cat’s perspective, an epiphanic event which triggers his extended engagement with the role of the animal in philosophical thought: “It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever given me more food for thinking through this absolute alterity of the neighbor or of the next(-door) than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat” (2008: 11). In philosophical and scientific engagements with the nonhuman animal, Derrida maintains, the direction of the gaze is always from human subject to animal object and indeed he posits that the exclusion of the animal is foundational for philosophical thought as such: “They neither wanted nor had the capacity to draw any systematic consequence from the fact that an animal could, facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a word, address them” (13, original emphasis). If the perspective of the animal can be found anywhere, Derrida suggests, it is in imaginative literature: “thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry” (7). Notably, Derrida’s wording here, “la pensée de l’animal” (2006: 23), is ambiguous and allows for an even stronger statement: not “thinking concerning the animal”, as David Wills’ English translation has it, but “the animal’s thought”. It should be clarified that far from disputing the existence of animal cognition, Derrida voices uncertainty here about the possibility of “the animal’s thought” ever entering human thought or language. Of course, as Thomas Nagel has pointedly reminded us, differently embodied experiences are phenomenologically inaccessible to us, even in imagination, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 2 Heidegger’s ek-sistence emphasises standing out. As Michael Wheeler (2011) explains in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, that particular human form of Dasein stands out in two senses: “Dasein can stand back or ‘out’ from its own occurrence in the world and observe itself ” and “Dasein stands out in an openness to and an opening of Being”. 3 More recently, critics like Heather Keenleyside (2016) and Sebastian Schönbeck (2018) have argued for a revaluation of the much-maligned genre of the fable and the rhetorical use of animal imagery more generally, suggesting that rhetorical uses of animals like personification can “help to restore the animal as a distinctive mode of being and relation, and one that is common to all kinds of people” (Keenleyside 2016: 17). since they are likely “not [to] be describable even in the most general experien‐ tial terms available to us” (1974: 440). Since we can have no bodily experience of perceiving our environment through sonar senses, the experiential world of the bat must always remain entirely alien and incommensurable. This alien experi‐ ence, moreover, would be incommunicable, since our language expresses human phenomenology, but can have no conceptual and experiential vocabulary which reaches beyond the human. Indeed, the role that language itself has played historically to separate and differentiate humans from animals poses another hurdle to any attempt to turn the gaze in the medium of language (Baker 2019: 8-14). Like the sonar, which is particular to the embodied sense of the bat and must categorically remain experientially inaccessible to us, language does not only express, but is foundational to, our specific kind of human experientiality. As Heidegger puts it, “language is the house of being in which the human being ek-sists by dwelling” (1998: 254). 2 For Heidegger, as for many others, the animal, being unable to speak, is therefore lacking. However, a more humble perspective may suggest that bats lack language like we lack a sonar sense. Why should one experiential capacity (language) be thought superior to the other (sonar)? In any case, to bring any kind of nonhuman animal perspective into language is unavoidably an anthropocentric and anthropomorphic act. Therefore it is no surprise that, while animal characters and animal speakers may abound in literature and may even play a central role for whole genres like the fable, or children’s literature, they are rarely, as Margot Norris notes, “allowed to be themselves, to refer to Nature and to their own animality without being pressed into symbolic service as metaphors, or as figures in fable or allegory” (1985: 17). 3 Moreover, as Derrida repeatedly insists, there is no animal, there are only very different kinds of animals. To speak of “the animal” (and even more so of “the nonhuman”) runs the danger of silently passing over insurmountable incommensurabilities (2008: 31, 34). Even in literature, then, Derrida’s pensée de l’animal is a rare beast, though literary critics since Derrida have been out to hunt for it, some under the term Derrida himself uses (but did not expand upon) of zoopoetics. As Kári DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 196 Irmtraud Huber Driscoll and Eva Hoffmann define it, “zoopoetics involves not only seeing but also […] attentive listening ‒ a practise of ‘listening otherwise’ ‒ […] to the animal in order to recover something that has been forgotten or repressed”, an attentiveness strongly emphasising embodiment and thus serving as “a sudden reminder of one’s own corporeality, and hence of one’s animality” (2018: 3). Adrian Moe shares this focus on embodiment and attentiveness but goes a step further in claiming the animal as co-creator, arguing that “Zoopoetics is the process of discovering innovative breakthroughs in form through attentiveness to another species’ bodily poiesis” (2014: 10). For Moe, successful zoopoetics is, centrally, a question of form, that is, it is predicated on the formally experimental possibilities which are more usually realised in poetry, rather than in narrative prose. Scott Knickerbocker agrees, acknowledging, more broadly, the potential of ecopoetics in a “sensuous poesis”, which he defines as “the process of rematerializing language specifically as a response to nonhuman nature” (2012: 2). Both Moe and Knickerbocker thus favour formally unconventional poetry for their analyses. Because zoopoetics is ideologically positioned to reject excessive anthropo‐ morphism, and because of its focus on formal experimentation, poems which imaginatively enter an animal’s point of view or even go so far as to give animals a voice have drawn somewhat less attention by critics of zoopoetics. Such imaginative projections all too easily appear whimsical or may seem to drift into a facile anthropomorphism. We are prone to associate animal speakers with tales for children and relegate them to the nursery, while at the same time we have become increasingly wary of imaginative appropriations of the other. Yet, as I want to show, blatant anthropomorphism can also be used strategically as a poetic tool which may serve to turn the gaze, to see ourselves being seen by the animal. In this, I find my attention drawn not so much to the experimentations of poetic form but to a different affordance of poetry, namely, poetic address. If previous critics found zoopoetic potential primarily in poetry’s “rematerializing of language” (Knickerbocker 2012: 1) or in the “pervasive obsession with textural gestures” Moe identifies in poetry of the long twentieth century (2014: 22), my focus draws attention to the affordances of “one of lyric’s most unmistakable rhetorical features” (Theinová 2025: 48): more immediately than a narrative text, lyric poetry elicits the question “who is this addressed to? ” irrespective of whether it is directly apostrophic or no. Even where the addressee is made explicit, Jonathan Culler insists, lyric address is triangulated: in addressing itself to someone, it always addresses the reader as well, and even if it foregoes direct address, it always invokes “an indirect ‘you’” which “lingers as a spectral DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry 197 presence, a yearning, something like love” (Culler 2018: 243). Indeed, as William Waters has argued, [t]he awkward fact is that poetry […] enacts ‒ for us, as readers, now ‒ not so much a stable communicative situation as a chronic hesitation, a faltering, between monologue and dialogue, between “talking about” and “talking to”, third and second person, indifference to interlocutors and the yearning to have one. (2003: 8) This moment of address, as both Culler and Waters emphasise, takes place in a ritualistic, iterable present of encounter: “poems can invoke objects, can people a space of the lyric ‘now’ with forms and forces that may have pasts and futures, certainly, but that are convoked as presences” (Culler 2018: 226). I would like to argue that it is precisely in this communicative indirection and hesitation that an animal may gaze back at us through the anthropomorphic veil of language in the brief encounter of epiphanic intensity which is the temporal structure of the lyric. In its iterative present and its brevity, I would like to suggest, the lyric form is particularly amenable to those “poets and prophets […] men and women who admit to taking upon themselves the address that an animal addresses to them” (Derrida 2008: 14). As poems which imagine or enact an animal perspective further raise the question of “who is speaking? ” they always speak in at least a double voice, with the human author’s attempt to bring the animal perspective into language. At the same time, address elicits a response, which remains absent from the lyric text itself, only latent in it as a range of possibilities. Thus, lyric address opens up a playing field for the questions Derrida identified as central: “The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means” (8; original emphasis). As I would like to argue, the multiplicity of lyric address may pose response and responsibility as a question even in the face of blatant anthropomorphism. Zoopoetic address invites us to acknowledge that the animal has its own perspective, and that this gaze may very well expose our own nakedness. In what follows, I want to probe these communicative instabilities in a historically wide-ranging and avowedly eclectic array of examples which explore animal perspectives in different ways. As Bernaerts et al. suggest, texts with animal speakers or narrators can be conceptually situated “on a continuum that goes from an anthropocentric mode of representation of non-human experiences to the imaginative exploration of the phenomenal world of non-human animals” (2014: 75) and can be understood to enact a “double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization, human and non-human experientiality” (69; original emphasis). My examples cover a broad range on DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 198 Irmtraud Huber that continuum, from emphatic anthropocentrism banking on empathy to the defamiliarised rendering of a herd mentality. A focus on lyric address rather than on experimental form makes it possible, I argue, to explore a longer history of poetry’s ability to engage with nonhuman perspectives, reaching back beyond the twentieth century. My first two examples, Anna Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition” (1773) and May Kendall’s “The Lay of a Trilobite” (1885) feature animal speakers which directly address a human audience and make no attempt at imagining an animal experientiality which would differ significantly from human perception. Their anthropomorphism is glaring, and the tone of their poems is sentimental (Barbauld) or satirical (Kendall). In their direct address to their human audience, they elicit a direct response: they call directly for action or self-reflection. In spite of the anthropocentrism they can easily be accused of, I argue, the animal’s direct address in these poems productively invites an imaginative turning of the gaze which pre-empts Derrida in grounding this moment in the affect of shame. In a next step, I turn to two poems in which the animal denies the gaze and in which this very denial stands at the centre of the imaginary leap into their perspective: Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther” (1903) and Ted Hughes’ “The Jaguar” (1957). Avoiding apostrophe, both these poems are oblique in their structure of address, hovering between an address to the animal and the evocation of precisely the failure of communication between the animal other and the human. In this ambiguity they imaginatively inhabit the animal’s perspective even while the possibility of response suggested by these poems is predicated on an acknowledgement of the experiential gap at the centre of such projection. In the final set of poems, the animals speak again, but humans are no longer their interlocutors. Les Murray’s “The Cows on Killing Day” (1991) goes furthest among my examples in the attempt to envisage animal phenomenology by defamiliarising language and perception in what can be read as a kind of dramatic monologue which radically decentres human perspectives. Alice Oswald’s “Swan” (2014), finally, gives a postmortem voice to the eponymous bird, in an anthropomorphism in which human imagery points towards the animal, in a reversal of the more familiar use of animals or animal imagery as stand-in for humans. While I proceed chronologically, I can make no attempt to situate each text adequately in its historical specificity, nor do my examples suffice to suggest a diachronic development. Yet each pair of poems shares more than historical proximity in employing different varieties of the same structure of address. Rather than making a historical argument, however, I want to showcase a DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry 199 4 The poem’s subtitle “Found in the trap where he had been confin’d all night” and its dedication “To Doctor Priestley” would have provided even contemporary readers with much of this context. range of ways in which poetry can accommodate la pensée de l’animal in spite of, or indeed, because of, its explicit and unavoidable anthropomorphism. Ultimately, I want to suggest that lyric structures of address afford glimpses of animal perspectives as momentary epiphanic encounters, which ground their visions of interspecies communication in a recognition of shared vulnerability. Such recognition, as Timothy C. Baker suggests drawing on the work of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, may serve as the grounding of a new sense of relationality: “Vulnerability, in this light, is not simply one of the many attributes that living creatures share: it is instead the basis of a new understanding of the world that highlights difference, instability, and the indeterminate” (2019: 26). Such instability and indeterminacy lies at the heart of the poems’ forms of nonhuman address. For all their anthropomorphism, they ultimately avoid full appropriation precisely by their brevity and ambiguous communicative structure. Anna Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition” (1773) The composition of Anna Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition” is embedded in an anecdote which connects the poem directly to the wider discourse of emerging animal rights activism rooted in an eighteenth-century culture of sensibility. During a dinner at the house of her friend, the scientist Joseph Priestley, a mouse caught in a trap was brought in and set by to be used in the morning for Priestley’s experiments on the composition of air (Priestley is credited with the discovery of oxygen). 4 Barbauld wrote the “Petition” and put it between the bars of the mouse’s cage to be found there in the morning, allegedly effecting the release of the prisoner (Bellanca 2003: 48). The poem cleverly draws on established conventions of the use of animals and animal voices in satire and children’s literature of the day (Barbauld often wrote about animals in her own children’s fiction), masking her serious concerns in a humorous tone (Weldon 2002: 3). But, as the poem’s popularity also attests, its structure of address extends significantly beyond Priestley as the immediate addressee of this particular mouse’s plight. The poem uses markedly simple language and, by calling itself a “prayer” (l. 1) and evoking hymns by its use of common metre (quatrains of alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines), the mouse’s address to its captor deliberately parallels a human’s address to God. The poem thus sets out, at first, to establish DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 200 Irmtraud Huber a clear hierarchy between man and mouse in which the mouse repeatedly positions itself as inferior and insignificant, asking its captor not to “triumph that thy wiles betrayed / A prize so little worth” (ll. 15‒16), and reminding him that the mouse only feeds on the leftovers of the human’s feast, a “slender boon” (l. 20). Yet, throughout, the difference it acknowledges is a difference of scale rather than kind. In its rhetorically sophisticated discourse, the poem introduces the mouse as a highly rational being, and the poem’s subtitle elevates the mouse to personhood by using the pronoun “he”. Thus, the poem’s rhetorical strategies depend on evoking empathy through stressing similarity, rather than difference. While the poem does not go so far as to positively claim equality for animals, it makes deft use of contemporary debates about animal souls to argue for the advisability of caution in their treatment (Weldon 2002: 5‒6). Though we may not be certain that the “ancient sages” were right when they taught that mind “shifts through matter’s varying forms / in every form the same”, we would do best to Beware, lest in the worm you crush, A brother’s soul you find; And tremble lest thy luckless hand Dislodge a kindred mind. (ll. 31‒36) While the poem thus invests heavily in imagining the mouse as an anthropocen‐ trically conceived rational animal, ultimately the argument relies on a different, less anthropocentric commonality: that of the suffering body. The poem’s repeated appeals to the “heart” and the “breast” and “hand” of the addressee are not merely common sentimental tropes but put an emphasis on the shared embodiment on which the mouse eventually bases its most forceful plea. Even if it is denied a soul and mind, even if “this transient gleam of day / Be all of life we share” (ll. 37‒38; original emphasis), the fact of shared life should entitle the mouse to the pity of its captor. The final stanza drives this point home in its reminder that what mice and men share, in the end, is their vulnerability: So, when unseen destruction lurks, Which men, like mice, may share, May some kind angel clear thy path, And break the hidden snare. (ll. 45‒48) In this emphasis on similarity and in the appropriation of rational discourse it is admittedly all too easy to lose the actual animal from sight. Nowhere does the poem even begin to attempt to imagine an animal experientiality which would differ from ours; indeed, it carefully avoids suggesting any such fundamental DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry 201 difference, as its argument is based entirely on commensurability. Moreover, the poem’s repeated invocation of liberty certainly invites a metaphorical reading as an anthropocentric plea against tyranny, as the hierarchies of the text map all too clearly onto political and class hierarchies of the time. As Mary Ellen Bellanca suggests, “Barbauld’s ‘Petition’ wields a rhetoric of sensibility that sought to change attitudes about inequality ‒ and the optional violence of unequal power relations ‒ in many forms: chattel slavery, incarceration, marriage, labor, and animal ownership” (2003: 48). The text has also been read productively as a strategic intervention by a female poet instrumentalising a domestic setting to challenge a scientific authority which excludes her as woman (Ready 2004; Saunders 2002), thus using the animal speaker to foreground and challenge a gendered power imbalance. Yet, I would like to argue that ultimately the power of the poem lies in the way it brings all these potential contexts and structures of address back to the specific situation from which it arises and thus back to the actually endangered trembling body of the mouse in the cage in Priestley’s house and the address it directs at its captor. The various possible anthropocentric readings, I would suggest, do not obscure the mouse’s case but throw it into stark relief, as the mouse only works as an effective symbol as long as we acknowledge the reality of its suffering and the claim this suffering has on us. Only if we allow ourselves to feel exposed to the animal’s gaze, if we acknowledge the possibility of this look and this address and admit the response it calls for, will we feel the shame and pity the poem aims to evoke. May Kendall’s nonhuman speakers May Kendall’s “The Lay of the Trilobite” (1887) also features an animal speaker addressing a human being, indeed, the human race, in direct speech, but this animal is not only already dead, and thus beyond suffering, but extinct. Kendall’s trilobite addresses man across a deep temporal and ontological divide which allows for an ironic detachment, even while the Darwinian evolution theory the poem draws on has, by this time, unsettled clear ontological distinctions between humans and animals. While Barbauld attempts to elicit empathy by stressing creaturely commonality before God against the background of onto‐ logical difference, Kendall’s trilobite sets out from an evolutionary assumption of common ancestry to ultimately stress difference. Kendall’s speaker, like Barbauld’s is a small animal, apparently insignificant, and in both cases, the direct addressee is a male scientist or natural philosopher who claims real or discursive power over the speaker. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 202 Irmtraud Huber Kendall’s poem, too, employs common metre throughout its octaves, but its primary formal reference is not the hymn but the ballad, as the title already flags. In a short frame narrative, the first-person speaker, a scientist, encounters the fossil of a trilobite and muses gratefully and grandiosely on their difference: How wonderful it seemed and right, The providential plan, That he should be a Trilobite And I should be a Man! (ll. 13‒16) At this moment, the trilobite speaks up and reminds his addressee of their common ancestry: […] you evolved your shining lights Of wisdom and perfection From Jelly-fish and Trilobites By Natural Selection. (ll. 29‒32) While the trilobite thus claims kinship with man, its main argument relies on difference: Man’s evolution, it suggests, has merely led to confusion, suffering, war and useless knowledge. The trilobite, in contrast, lived “gentle, stupid, free from woe” on “Salt water” and “carbonate of lime” (ll. 49, 55‒56). With his sense of superiority crushed, the scientist concludes the poem with a cry that oh, it was a happy plight, Of liberty and ease, To be a simple Trilobite In the Silurean seas. (ll. 69‒72) Of course, the poem is whimsical in its satire, and it may seem a far stretch to look for a nonhuman perspective in it. And yet I would contend that in its suggestion that human systems of value are irrelevant to the existence of the trilobite, as is human knowledge ‒ as a humorous footnote on the trilobite’s indifference concerning its zoological categorisation as an Arachnid or Crustacean serves to emphasise ‒ the poem does open up the possibility of imagining a nonhuman perspective, precisely because it does not take itself seriously. By letting the trilobite address a man whom the poem introduces from the very first as a figure of some ridicule, its triangulated address establishes a critical self-distance from which the reader may laugh at human hubris, from which we can see ourselves being seen by the animal as an animal. Meanwhile, the trilobite’s address is directed at the reader as much as at the scientist in the poem. While the poem does not invite us properly into the experientiality of the trilobite, in the laughter DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry 203 it evokes it turns a defamiliarising gaze onto humanity in general, and thus on the reader no less than on the scientist. Kendall uses a similar strategy in another poem which ridicules precisely the strategy of empathy which Barbauld’s poem pursues. In “The Philanthropist and the Jelly-fish” (1887), the philanthropist encounters a beautiful jelly-fish, significantly gendered female, dying on the beach. Although he soon realises that there are hundreds more of them and he would be unable to save them all, he decides to rescue this one. At this point, the jelly-fish herself intervenes, and declares the misguidedness of the philanthropist’s pity: She said: “Your culture’s incomplete, Though your intention’s kind; The sand, the seaweed, and the heat I do not really mind. (ll. 33‒36) The jelly-fish proclaims that she is indifferent to whether she is living in the sea or dying on the beach. Not beset by care, doubt or depression, she is at peace everywhere: It does not matter what may come I’m dead to woe or bliss: I haven’t a Sensorium, And that is how it is. (ll. 49‒50; original emphasis) The philanthropist’s mistake, according to the jellyfish, is his projection of human values and human pity onto the jelly-fish, by imagining her as a female beauty in need of rescue, by individualising her, and by projecting human experientiality onto her entirely different kind of embodied experience. In contrast to the “Lay of the Trilobite” this poem, we can see, is invested in imagining the jelly-fish’s phenomenological experience of the world and uses this to expose the speaker’s “kind intentions” as misguidedly anthropocentric. Indeed, the text suggests that the main motivation for the philanthropist’s act is a selfish wish to think himself a heroic saviour in order to compensate for his personal failures. The poem’s title can thus be already read as an ironic commentary: The philanthropist is, precisely, a lover of man, not of animals. Once again, the poem’s structure of address is used to create a humorous distance between reader and speaker, while the jelly-fish’s ridicule is potentially directed as much at the reader’s sentimentalism as at the scientist’s. While both Barbauld and Kendall use animal speakers in deliberately whim‐ sical ways and while both employ them strategically to intervene as women in the male-dominated discourse of science, they differ in strategy and intention. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 204 Irmtraud Huber Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition” emphasises commonality in suffering and vulnerability, while Kendall strategically emphasises difference to cast a critical and satirical glance on human behaviour. In both cases, though, to give their nonhumans an actual voice serves as a deliberate and strategically employed anthropomorphism but pushes their texts towards a humorous and whimsical tone in the incongruity of the rational discourse of their modest creatures. Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Der Panther” and Ted Hughes’ “The Jaguar” The next two texts I want to turn to choose a rather different path. The animals at the centre of Rilke’s best-known poem “Der Panther” and Ted Hughes’ “The Jaguar” are not the modest critters we have so far encountered, and they do not appeal so much to our pity as to our awe. In contrast to my previous examples, there is no direct address at all in these descriptive poems. Indeed, the communicative and experiential gap between animal and human conditions the poems’ evocation of animal alterity. Yet while the animals in these poems do not address humans through language, the poems do imagine such an address, albeit obliquely, in the animal’s movement and gaze. As these comments already suggest, we shift from humour to sublimity, from rational discourse to lyric scene. In both cases, the direction of the gaze seems initially all too clear, as the animals are exhibited in zoos. Their situation turns them into objects for the delectation of the human viewers. In his essay “Why Look at Animals”, John Berger has argued that “The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal”. The zoo is thus a symbol for, or perhaps symptom of, a more wide-ranging and more fundamental loss Berger identifies: “That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished” (1980: 26). Animals have been marginalised and pushed out of everyday experience by the twentieth century and so the zoo becomes the setting for poetic engagements with this lost gaze. In face of this loss, both poems attempt to revert the gaze by assuming the perspective of the captive cat. Rilke’s poem emphasises this visual economy by introducing the panther’s gaze with its very first words and identifying the animal’s suffering with its break-down: “Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehen der Stäbe / so müd geworden, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry 205 5 “Scanning the bars, his gaze is grown so numb / that there is nothing left that it can hold” (ll. 1‒2). 6 “to him, it seems as if ” (l. 4) 7 “like a dance of strength around some center / in which a great will stands still, paralyzed” (ll. 8‒9). 8 “Only, the pupils’ curtain lifts sometimes, / in silence, and an image rushes past, / then down the tensing stillness of the limbs, / and dies deep in the heart made fast” (ll. 11-14). 9 In a compelling zoopoetic reading of the poem, Kári Driscoll correctly points out that this uncertainty could in fact already be said to mark the beginning of the poem as “it becomes ambiguous to whom, or what, the third-person singular possessive pronoun daß er nichts mehr hält“ (ll. 1‒2). 5 The panther is thus denied precisely what the human zoo-visitors are there to do: to look, to gaze at. The animal gazes but can no longer see the world beyond the bars of his cage; he paces, but all his powerful movement leads nowhere, is just an expression of numbness. If the poem imaginatively enters the panther’s experience in the first stanza (“Ihm ist, als ob”; l. 3), 6 the second stanza’s evocation of imprisonment through claustrophobic movement acknowledges perspectival distance in its use of simile. The panther’s movement is “wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte, / in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht” (ll. 8‒9). 7 In contrast to the direct assertion of the panther’s perspective in the first stanza, here the panther’s will is (anthropomorphically) inferred by the animal’s movement, projected onto the panther from outside. Thus, crucially, this second stanza adds the human observer to the scene and reintroduces a distance separating animal experientiality from human imagination, since the simile necessarily acknowledges the perceptual gap it attempts to bridge. Once we take this into account, the final stanza of the poem unfolds its whole ambiguity: Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille sich lautlos auf ‒. Dann geht ein Bild hinein, geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille ‒ und hört im Herzen auf zu sein. 8 Who is it, in this moment of a realised gaze, who looks, and what do they see? Is it the panther, as an initial reading surely suggests, who is occasionally able to see the world beyond the cage bars after all, and thus sees the human observer standing in front of it in a briefly realised encounter? But how does the stillness of the limbs square with the relentless movement of the previous stanza? Or is it rather the human observer, standing in tense expectation in front of the cage, from whose eyes the curtain lifts momentarily to allow them to actually see the panther as the poem sees him, as a “great will”? 9 Or is this DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 206 Irmtraud Huber that opens the poem refers” (2018: 40) and suggests it could be the reader, who can no longer see the world behind the bars of the text. Such a reading, however, assumes the impossibility of the encounter between human and animal which my reading of the poem more hopefully holds out. moment perhaps a moment of a shared gaze, a moment of epiphany similar to Derrida’s encounter with the gaze of his rather more domestic pussycat? In the ambiguities of this final stanza, the poem projects the possibility of an encounter which realises kinship, albeit briefly, a kinship rooted, like in Barbauld’s poem, in shared embodiment (the eye, the limbs, the heart) and realised through the gaze. Yet, in contrast to Barbauld’s rationally discoursing mouse, the moment of recognition in Rilke’s poem remains predicated on the realisation of difference, which acknowledges the panther as other. Ted Hughes’ poem “The Jaguar” denies such a shared gaze entirely. His jaguar is only encountered in the third of the poem’s five stanzas, the first two of which set the scene of the zoo and bring the human perspective to the fore from the beginning. In contrast to Rilke’s poem whose perspective remains focussed on the panther’s cage throughout, trapped like the animal itself, Hughes poem roams through the zoo, past apes, parrots, tiger and lion, “[c]age after cage” (l. 6) before coming to a halt in front of the jaguar. The gaze it introduces at this point is not that of the animal, but the more expected one of the “crowd”, which “stands, stares, mesmerized / As a child in a dream” (l. 10‒11). But Hughes’ jaguar, it turns out, is also not restricted to his cage, in spite of its “prison darkness” (l. 12) and its “bars” (l. 16). His gaze, “the drills of his eyes” (l. 12), is not empty, or blind, but “visionary” (l. 17) and explosive: they drill holes into the cage and burn on a “short fierce fuse” (l. 13). If Rilke’s panther sees no world behind the bars of his cage, Hughes’ jaguar sees no cage but “The world [which] rolls under the long thrust of his heel” (l. 19). The poem’s movement is somewhat contradictory here, however: it crosses into the jaguar’s perspective in its final two stanzas, and thus imaginatively bridges the divide between animal and human experience, once more by emphasising embodiment (“the bang of blood in the brain”, l. 15; “the long thrust of his heel”, l. 19) and explicitly likening the animal’s experience with the very human one of a “visionary in his cell” (l. 17). Yet what it imagines is a radical experiential divide between the crowd, which sees a caged animal, and the animal, who sees no cage, but the world. Any reciprocity of gaze becomes an impossibility as the animal’s experience of his world erases both the cage and the human observers in front of it. If my reading of Rilke’s poem held out the possibility of encountering the gaze of the other in a moment of mutual recognition, however fleeting, Hughes’ poem accuses the injustice of the jaguar’s treatment in withholding this possibility. Yet by denying DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry 207 10 The eponymous protagonist of J. M. Coetze’s novel Elizabeth Costello offers a compar‐ ison between the two poems which comes to rather different conclusions, accusing Rilke of using the panther merely as a symbol while celebrating Hughes for setting the jaguar free. For an assessment of this reading and its complex status as a fictional piece of criticism, see Driscoll (2018). 11 Indeed, Murray’s “Bats’ Ultrasound”, one stanza of which is entirely onomatopoeic, reads as a response and attempted refutation of Nagel’s point in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat? ”. the possibility of encounter, Hughes’ poem threatens to appropriate the jaguar’s perspective for the very human poet who speaks for it. Animal alterity may all too easily collapse here into a juxtaposition of the visionary poet and the mesmerized crowd, a scenario in which the animal gaze and its call for response has been side-lined. 10 By imagining the animal’s address as a non-verbal act, “Der Panther” and “The Jaguar” are much less anthropomorphic than my previous examples, which gave their animal speakers a rational voice. Instead, both are strongly invested in the accusatory effect and affect of the gaze of the other, whether it is met or not. Through the poems’ shift into the animal perspective, the jaguar and the panther address us no less than the rationally speaking animals of my previous examples. What has become increasingly questionable, however, for Rilke and Hughes, is our ability to respond to such an address. Les Murray’s “The Cows on Killing Day” (1991) Among the poems I discuss, Les Murray’s poetry offers by far the most radical attempts to enter into a nonhuman perspective. If all the poems discussed so far feature a human observer or interlocutor, Les Murray has repeatedly attempted to do what Thomas Nagel assumes to be impossible: to find language for a different kind of (animal) experientiality. 11 Several of the poems in his sequence “Presence: Translations from the Natural World” assume a range of animal voices, from farm animals to eagles to a shellback tick, but these animal voices differ significantly from the rational animal voices we have encountered in the poems by Barbauld and Kendall. Like Rilke and Hughes, Murray is invested in emphasising, rather than closing, what Berger calls the “narrow abyss of non-comprehension” (1980: 3) across which the animal scrutinises us. Though Murray’s animals speak, their speech is not addressed to humans but instead the poems attempt to figure forth radically different kinds of experientiality, translated into human language. Thus, they function like dramatic monologues, a kind of poetry that is explicitly overheard in that it figures speakers who address someone else than the reader, or who soliloquise, in a dramatic situation. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 208 Irmtraud Huber In contrast to Barbauld’s and Kendall’s speakers, Murray’s animals do not communicate with humans. They only speak to themselves. Translation is an apt metaphor for this structure of address. As Gillian Beer puts it, Translators may choose to accommodate the originating language to the translation, smoothing the joints so that it lies level and familiar to the reader in the substituted language. Or the translator may keep the sense of the alien, of the clotted strangeness in experience that will not quite submit to the form in which it must now appear. That is the choice Les Murray makes. These animals rear up in their full presence and yet are unaccommodated. He keeps the bruise of movement, of being, wrenched into language. (2005: 319) Instead of the similes, the crossing gazes, the rational discourse and the appeals to empathy arising from kinship we have encountered before, Murray’s animals remain utterly alien. Yet, at least in some of his poems, the encounter with this animal perspective turns the gaze on humans as well and establishes the animal’s claim on us no less than the more direct addresses discussed before. One poem which does so powerfully is “The Cows on Killing Day”. This poem is not part of the “Presences” sequence, but was published in Murray’s earlier collection, Dog Fox Field (1991). The most immediate and striking strategy the poem employs to establish a cow experientiality radically different from our own is in its use of pronouns to imagine a herd mentality. “All me are standing on feed” (l. 1), the poem begins. “All me have just been milked” (l. 2), but “One me smells of needing the bull” (l. 6) and “the me who needs mounts on me, hopping to signal the bull” (l. 10). This use of pronouns makes it impossible, and indeed irrelevant, to answer the question whether the centre of perception and speaker is a single cow or the entire herd. From the perspective offered by the poem that distinction makes no sense in the first place. All cows are “me”, and so everything that happens to each cow happens to “me”. “Me” becomes a pronoun that works simultaneously in singular and plural and the perspective of the poem does not so much shift from cow to cow ‒ the one who needs the bull, the one who is mounted ‒ but is a composite of all these cow perspectives. Difference enters the poem primarily through interspecies encounter, though in these encounters, too, the poem works by defamiliarising a human perspec‐ tive. The woman bringing hay to the herd is “the heifer human” (l. 11) who “smells of needing the bull human / and is angry” (ll. 17‒18), the “carrion-stink‐ ing dog […] is calf of human and wolf ” (l. 40). The poem thus attempts to imagine a cow’s reliance on the sense of smell, and their way of making sense of the world in relationship to themselves and in their own image. It does so DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry 209 by emphasising the bodily functions of feeding and digestion, and by a strong reliance on repetition, which may be understood as a zoopoetic attempt to “re-enact, re-create, mimic, or respond to the gestures of animals” (Moe 2014: 11‒12) in Moe’s sense, in that it is reminiscent of a cows’ constant regurgitation and rumination. Nonetheless, the poem’s language clearly communicates; it does not disinte‐ grate into pure onomatopoeia as some of Murray’s poems in “Presences” do. All that the cows say makes sense, but its expression is ever so slightly off: “The sky is shining” is the second sentence of the poem (l. 1). All too easily this could drift into the ridiculous, but from the very beginning Murray manages to give a sinister note to the picture. The title, of course, already announces what is in store for the cows, but the poem first creates empathy despite its emphasis on difference by focusing on the cows’ embodied sensations and emotions. The experience of being milked is an uncanny “dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths / that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out”, (ll. 3‒4) and yet, heart-wrenchingly, “being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me” (l. 9). The cows dream of “horning dead” (l. 19) the dog, to “jam him in his squeals” (l. 20), but death, when it enters the poem, does so at the hand of humans. One cow is left in the yard ‒ “Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now” (l. 22) ‒ and is shot and then cut up by the farmer, while the terrified rest of the herd watches. The poem’s use of pronouns is particularly effective here, as the shared pronoun “me” emphasises the shared suffering of the cows, an empathy which the humans in the poem markedly lack. Rendering this everyday scene of slaughter from the cows’ perspective brings out its full gothic horror: A shining leaf, like of the bitter gum tree is with the human. It works in the neck of me and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy […] Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving. All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed, and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me. (ll. 31‒39) In final twist of horror, the dog “is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter” (l. 41) at which the cows turn and run away in terror. For all its investment in defamiliarisation, then, the poem’s main affect emphasises, once again, the shared vulnerability of our embodied existence, our shared exposure to violence, pain and death. The cows do not address us directly, and the events in the poem open no space for an interspecies encounter which would call for a response and responsibility (as all the poems DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 210 Irmtraud Huber previously discussed did in one way or another). Instead, its indirect structure of address invites us, as readers, both to partake of the cows’ perspective while yet continuing to acknowledge the gap between human and cow experientiality. The cows in the poem speak both to and through the reader, and thus, as Merle Marianne Feddersen puts it, remind us that “nonhuman others, too, are in possession of rhetorical bodies ‒ bodies that invite us to read aloud and to listen closely” (2021: 102). Alice Oswald’s “The Swan” If our trajectory has led us from direct animal address through various degrees of complicating and withholding such an encounter, in the final poem I would like to look at, Alice Oswald’s “The Swan”, this encounter takes the form of a mutual haunting. The poem attempts to bridge a double ontological divide. Not only does it enter into the perspective of the titular swan, but this swan is already dead and looks back on her own decaying body, while the poem’s text spreads out on the page as if to suggest the body’s disintegration. Considering the emphasis all the other examples put on embodiment, this surprising move may strike one as purely anthropocentric in its mind-body dichotomy: the swan experiences what literature has often imagined humans to experience as their souls leave their bodies and look back at them with a mingled sense of pity and disgust, an experience which is rendered in the poem in indirect and free indirect discourse from the swan’s perspective. In this, the poem uses strikingly anthropocentric imagery, with the swan getting panicky up out of her clothes and mid-splash looking down again at what a horrible plastic mould of herself split-second climbing out of her own cockpit (ll. 5‒9) All the images here are human-wrought: clothing, plastic, a plane. What does it mean to project such an experience onto a swan and to use such anthropocentric language for it? To a certain degree, by imagining the perspective of a dead swan, the poem circumvents Nagel’s problem. The swan is no longer embodied and thus its experience is no longer an embodied experience radically different from ours. If we attribute the swan with a soul, this soul, as Barbauld’s mouse suggested, might be a kindred soul. Paradoxically, it may thus be easier to imagine the perspective of a dead swan than a living one, since any perspective from beyond death is a purely imaginary one, whether human or swan. We cannot experience DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry 211 what it is like to be dead just as we cannot experience what it is like to be a swan. Moreover, for all its anthropocentric language, the poem does resist dissolving the swan entirely into a human-like consciousness, by training its focus on the rotting animal body: “the plane-crash mess of her wings” (l. 2), “those two white clips that connected my strength / to its floatings” (ll. 12‒13), “the china serving-dish of a breast bone / and how thickly the symmetrical quill-points / were threaded in backwards through the leather underdress” (ll. 15‒17). While thoroughly anthropocentric in its imagery, this evocation of bodily decay emphasises the physical structuring of the bird’s anatomy. The anthropocentric imagery here points to rather than beyond the reality of the swan’s decaying body. The swan looks back thinking “strange / strange” (ll. 10‒11; 19‒20) and leaves “her life and all its tools / with their rusty juices trickling back to the river” (ll. 27‒28). Once again it is the body which roots the poem’s focus in the animal, though here it is not embodied experience, nor an emphasis on vulnerability and suffering which is foregrounded, but the materiality of the body in the process of decay. In death, and in its relation to its decaying body, the swan becomes familiar to us, too familiar perhaps, as the poem’s puzzling conclusion acknowledges. The swan is “taking a last look thinking” (l. 29) quick quick say something to the frozen cloud of the head before it thaws (ll. 30‒34) In the following final four stanzas, which visually mirror lines 32‒34 and thus formally mark a shift in the poem, the perspective zooms in on the dead bird’s eye. Within this dead eye, a very human scene unfolds, as if seen in a miniature snow globe: a bride walking to a wedding on a cold winter morning, though she may never arrive. The poem concludes with “bells like iron angels” (l. 44) which “keep ringing and ringing” (l. 46). The animal experience seems to have been entirely left behind in this ending, in which the swan herself continues to resonate only in the predominantly black and white colour-scheme of the strikingly Christian scene. How is one to reconcile this conclusion, which can easily impress one as “naively anthropomorphic” (Crucefix 2021), with a biocentric reading of the poem? I would suggest that one hint could be found in the striking reversal of movement from the first part of the poem in which the swan is “hurrying away” (l. 2), “lifting away” (l. 9) and again “lifting away” (l. 29), leaving the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 212 Irmtraud Huber “heaviness inside each feather” (l. 26) and the “fastenings” that “contain[ed]” (l. 21) her behind. In the final stanzas, however, the movement is down and in, not moving away from the body, but zooming in on the picture contained in its eye. If the swan perspective has dissolved here, perhaps that is because the swan consciousness is gone, and what the poem leaves us with is only our own, human attempt, to see anything in the swan’s dead eye, which can no longer return our gaze, but just reflect back to us our own imaginative projections. The shift in form, in the poem, from the unruly and scattered first stanzas to the strict containment of the concluding tercets may further signal this departure of the swan from the consciousness of the text. Yet by imagining the swan’s own perspective in its opening stanzas, the poem offers us the possibility to relate to the decaying swan’s body in a way which does not immediately appropriate it to symbolic purposes, does not establish immediately a human-animal hierarchy. The fact that the poem does ultimately not maintain this potential to its end only serves to emphasise that the imaginative encounter with the swan perspective is necessarily fleeting and tenuous and couched from the beginning in human terms. By offering an encounter with an animal which is already dead, the poem brings to the fore the ghostliness and epiphanic brevity of such encounters, and in its structure, it performs the difficulty of maintaining the encounter in language. While poetic language is the medium for the encounters in all of the examples I discuss, Oswald makes it descend here like a veil, or a wall (suggested by the piling up of block-like stanzas at the poem’s end) behind which the animal gaze is lost. Conclusion For all their differences, the poems I have discussed share a good deal of common ground. All of them do not merely speak about or even attempt to enter into animal experience, but they imagine moments of interspecies encounter, which invite us to acknowledge the animal’s address. They also all figure this encounter, in one way or another, as a violent one which emphasises the precariousness of embodiment and looks to mortality as its vanishing point. Moreover, they all, even before Derrida, emphasise the role of the gaze in this encounter. Differing widely in rhetorical strategy, tone and even aim, these poems, I suggest, illustrate the structural potential of lyric poetry to accommodate that “address […] from down there, from a wholly other origin” (Derrida 2008: 13; original emphasis). As Derrida suggests, the experience of such an address, the moment of seeing ourselves being seen may be iterative, but yet cannot be extended. We may perhaps touch radical alterity in visionary DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry 213 moments of interpellation and response, but we may never inhabit it. If language is the cage in which we are trapped, lyric poetry, in its brevity and slippery address, may occasionally afford us a glimpse at the world beyond. Works Cited Baker, Timothy C. 2019. Writing Animals: Language, Suffering, and Animality in Twenty-First-Century Fiction. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 1773. “The Mouse’s Petition”. In: Poems. 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New York: Fordham University Press. Driscoll, Kári/ Hoffmann, Eva, eds. 2018. What Is Zoopoetics? Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Driscoll, Kári./ Hoffmann, Eva. 2018. “Introduction: What Is Zoopoetics? ” In: Driscoll, Kári/ Hoffmann, Eva, eds., 1‒13. Driscoll, Kári. 2018. “Second Glance at the Panther, or: What Does it Mean to Read Zoopoetically? ” Frame 31/ 1 (May), 29‒47. Feddersen, Merle Marianne. 2021. “The Zoopoetics of Les Murray: Animal Poetry, Attentiveness and the More-Than-Human World”. Leviathan: Interdisciplinary Journal in English 7, 90‒111. Heidegger, Martin. 1998. “Letter on ‘Humanism’”. 1946. Trans. Frank A. Capuzzi. In: McNeill, William, ed., Pathmarks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 239-276. Hughes, Ted. 1957. “The Jaguar”. Poetry 89/ 5, 281‒282. Keenleyside, Heather. 2016. Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kendall, May. 1887. “Lay of the Trilobite”. 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Ready, Kathryn J. 2004. “‘What Then, Poor Beastie! ’: Gender, Politics, and Animal Experimentation in Anna Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’”. Eighteenth-Century Life 28/ 1, 92-114. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 2015. “Der Panther/ The Panther”. 1903. In: Rilke, Rainer Ma‐ ria/ Schoolfield, George C., New Poems. Trans. Len Krisak, Boydell & Brewer, 58-59. Saunders, Julia. 2002. “‘The Mouse’s Petition’: Anna Laetitia Barbauld and the Scientific Revolution”. The Review of English Studies 53/ 212, 500-516. Schönbeck, Sebastian. 2018. “‘Sire’, says the fox”: The Zoopoetics and Zoopolitics of the Fable in Kleist’s ‘On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking’”. In: Driscoll, Kári/ Hoffmann, Eva, eds., 81‒100. Theinová, Daniela. 2025. “Address”. In: Bundschuh, Jessica/ Huber, Irmtraud, eds. Hand‐ book of Poetic Form. Berlin: De Gruyter, 47‒65. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Waters, William. 2003. Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address. Ithaca, NY/ London: Cornell University Press. Weldon, Amy E. 2002. “‘The Common Gifts of Heaven’: Animal Rights and Moral Education in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ and ‘The Caterpillar’”. Romantic Textualities 8 ( June), 2‒13. Wheeler, Michael. 2011. “Martin Heidegger”. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Winter 2020 Edition. https: / / plato.stanford.edu/ archives/ win2020/ entries/ heidegger/ . DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0010 Animal Address: Nonhuman Perspectives in Lyric Poetry 215 From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray Raphael Zähringer Introduction In a recent user review on the digital distribution platform Steam, the video game Stray (developed in 2012 by BlueTwelve Studio) is praised as follows: “Very nice gameplay, a lot of deep (human) feelings and an impressive setting describes this game very much. Although just a small studio, BlueTwelve Studio has proven that they understood how to transport emotions through monitors” (PrinzExtratos 2025: n.p.). This may seem surprising at first glance, because in Stray, one does not play and control a human(oid) avatar, but a cat. Having lost their pack of fellow cats (presented to the player at the very beginning in an animated cutscene), it is the player’s task to find a way back by embarking on a highly emotional journey. This is precisely what makes the game so appealing: As human players, we are constantly confronted with the unstable boundaries of similarity and otherness of our avatar and of other life forms in the game: fellow cats, humanoid robots called Companions, a robotic drone that harbours the consciousness of a human scientist, and the critter-like Zurks. The more the player explores the game world (a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk city called Walled City 99, plus a few other locations such as the Outside), the more non-human perspectives open up, all of which force us to question our principles of human-centric empathy. In a field of tension between empathy (as indicated in the review) and defamiliarisation, Stray reflects what it means to be human in a world after human existence. In the following, this article will explore these nonhuman perspectives. First, it will elucidate the visual game design and gameplay mechanics and their potential and limits of enabling posthuman play. Second, it will discuss the feline main protagonist’s interactions with the game’s other nonhuman lifeforms and in doing so, the article will take care to straddle the balance between highlighting the game’s potential and acknowledging its inevitably restricted perspective within the confines of neoliberal capitalism. Furthermore, one must take into account scholarly DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 1 Such an understanding of play deviates significantly from the more traditional para‐ digm of play as a separate world featuring unquestioned rules in which players are pitted against each other in fair contest, as proposed by Huizinga (1938). critique of empathic functions in video games because they - like all other forms of cultural production, it seems - struggle with the “appropriation of affect” (Ruberg 2020: 60), i.e., with the problem that the way they present nonhuman perspectives might have to be considered yet another variety of ‘exoticism’ or, as Lisa Nakamura has it, identity tourism (2002). By engaging with this research, this article will at least partially refute existing criticism. Playing-cat or becoming-cat? A good starting point for discussing nonhuman perspectives would be the fundamentally “paradoxical idea that”, as Bernaerts et al. put it regarding nonhuman narratives (i.e., stories related by nonhuman narrators), “readers are invited to reflect upon aspects of human life stories of non-human narrators, whether they are animals, objects, or indefinable entities” (2014: 68). Nonhuman narratives and narration, in whatever form or medium, and regardless of their function, hinge on a “double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization and human and nonhuman experientiality” (Bernaerts et al. 2014: 69; original emphasis). Thus, nonhuman narratives bear a lot of potential, especially in the context of ecocritical, posthumanist, and other recent lines of thought that are interested in decentring the human: Against the grain of typical anthropocentric worldviews, they “may highlight and even challenge our conception of the human” (Bernaerts et al. 2014: 69). As noted by Caighlan Smith, Stray “decenters humans through [its] non-human avatar construction and an absenting of human characters in-game” (2024: 1) and, due to its feline main protagonist, can be categorised as “nonhuman play” (2). On this basis, Stray is a cornucopia of moments and encounters that evoke empathy with its avatar and feline main protagonist, other animals, and the many robot-like inhabitants of the game’s main location, Walled City 99. Beyond its storyline, Stray’s ability to present nonhuman perspectives is primarily due to the fact that it is a game. Playing and (inter)actively encountering nonhuman perspectives may expand the range and possibilities of experientiality. In the words of Sicart, play(ing) is a way of being in the world, “a form of understanding what surrounds us and who we are, and a way of engaging with others. Play is a mode of being human” (2014: 1). 1 Playing a cat in a world without humans is still human play, therefore, specifically because “Play is contextual. […] context is more complicated [than formally bound rules]; it’s a messier network of people, rules, negotiations, locations, and DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 218 Raphael Zähringer 2 For the challenges of making classical narratological concepts, such as Genette’s voice and focalisation, viable for game studies, see Vindigni (2025: 192-195). objects. Play happens in a tangled world of people, things, space, and cultures” (6; original emphasis). However, a specific game is merely a manifestation of this larger phenomenon (1) and is thus inherently limited, as will be addressed in the sections to come. For a discussion of Stray within the context of nonhuman perspectives, one might start with the very question of perspective in video games. As interactive media, video games, from a narratological vantage point, provide unique opportunities for focalisation and the change of perspective, both of which massively impact narrative communication and players’ accessing of information (Vindigni 2025: 193). However, the comparatively hands-on understanding of perspective in video games refers to the way the game world is visually presented to the player by means of a ‘camera’. The world or space presented in this manner can usually be navigated and can be called “navigable space” accordingly (Domsch 2013: 63). Among the most common options is third-person perspective, which is also used in Stray. It lets the player control their character - a cat, in this case - while viewing the character’s entire body as if a camera were pointed at it, keeping it in full view all the time. To a certain degree, one could argue that this perspective is nonhuman and defamiliarising. Obviously, in contrast to first-person perspective, third-person perspective in video games does not attempt to create the effect of immediately perceiving the game world through the protagonist’s eyes, and neither does it allow the player to ‘embody’ the character they play. Instead, it should rather be considered an abstraction, or a sort of desperation device because, if one does not obtain a first-person perspective, one must locate the ‘camera’ (another desperation device - or, rather, a somewhat inelegant analogy frequently used in video game journalism) elsewhere. 2 However, third-person/ over-shoulder perspective is highly conventional in video games; therefore, in terms of visual access of the game world’s information, it is more appropriate to call this an act of familiarisation rather than defamiliarisation in the sense of Bernaerts et al.. Nevertheless, there is some potential for defamiliarisation in the player’s avatar and their means of controlling it. In Stray, since the player takes control of a cat, the camera perspective and angle differ from that of third-person games in which one typically plays a humanoid character. In such games, the ‘camera’ is typically positioned slightly behind and over the avatar’s shoulder. Stray does that, too, but since the player’s avatar is so small in comparison to the architecture and navigable space of the game world, they must constantly tilt DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray 219 3 Given their audiovisual nature, video games are hard to quote; however, for the dialogues of Stray, there is a (hopefully appropriate) workaround. Beyond the few screenshots used, I will be quoting the in-game dialogue pieces as they are listed and tagged on the carefully maintained Stray wiki (https: / / stray.fandom.wiki/ stray). it upwards to find out where they are and where they are supposed to go. However, considering that third-person perspective facilitates a certain spatial and cognitive distance between player and avatar, the player does not entirely adopt the perceptual and affective perspective of Stray’s feline protagonist even though they control its movement. On the other hand, the fact that the player’s avatar is visible all the time contributes to the evocation of affect: The ginger tabby cat is, for lack of a better word, very cute. This makes it easy for the player to engage in cyborgian play with this creature and take responsibility for guiding it safely through a dangerous world. Thus, Stray appears to be a fairly conventional game at first because it does not facilitate cat-specific experientiality. For example, it does not simulate cats’ superior sense of hearing, their faster-than-human reflexes, or the way they perceive their surroundings by using their whiskers. The same goes for visual perception of the game world: The game does not attempt to simulate the effect of the reflecting pigment layer of cats’ eyes that lies underneath their retina, which enables cats to see in the dark. Neither does Stray reflect that cats, due to the (comparatively) small number of cone cells on their retina, have extremely limited colour vision, and cannot tell apart colours such as red, pink, or orange from different shades of what human beings would call grey. Instead, the player must rely on their human senses and gaming experiences to come to terms with a game world that boasts a very colourful (albeit run-down) urban cityscape packed with bright streetlamps and neon signs that contribute crucially to the game’s overall atmosphere. The necessity of human processing is highly obvious in a situation during the first section of the game. The walls of the urban environment through which players navigate their feline avatar are covered with posters and graffiti, but most of them are written in a nonhuman alphabet, and hence unreadable for the player. However, one of the player’s (and feline protagonist’s) first interactions with the game world’s artificial life is based on human sign systems. In chapter 2 (called Dead City), the player comes across a wall of screens. Some of these screens do show a stylised cat head; others show arrows pointing to the left; and the central screen shows the words “FOLLOW ME” (figure 1). 3 For the player, the message is made very clear: Since they play as a cat, they feel directly addressed, are asked to move their avatar to the left, and to keep following similar directions. Since this kind of processing obviously DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 220 Raphael Zähringer requires a human perspective, this first encounter emphasises how different perspectives interact and coalesce in Stray. Fig. 1: Personal in-game screenshot from chapter 2 (Dead City). Nonhuman gameplay At first glance, the gameplay mechanics of Stray are similar to those of the many third-person games which adopt a more human perspective. When played with a gamepad, the player controls the cat’s movement by using the left stick while rotating the camera with the right stick. Various buttons and triggers enable jumping, sprinting, and interaction with non-player characters (NPCs) and items, all of which are conventional in video games. Thus, to a certain degree, Stray, like video games in general, is “deeply enmeshed in neoliberal capitalism” (Smith 2024: 16) by giving the player something ‘exotic’ to consume within the established mechanisms of gaming. Nakamura’s theory of identity tourism, which describes the way in which online communities reproduce or reinforce stereotypes of marginalised groups, is pertinent here. While such communities take great interest in adopting gendered or racialised online identities (in chat communication as well as in the creation of video game avatars), their predominantly white male members tend to embark on such identity tours into “race and gender as amusing prostheses to be donned and shed without ‘real life’ consequences” (Nakamura 2002: 13 f.). Here, as well as in other spots to be explored later, it becomes clear that “Play is appropriative, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray 221 in that it takes over the context in which it exists and cannot be totally predetermined by such context. […] context becomes servant to the activity of playing” (Sicart 2014: 11; original emphasis). This also includes the solving of little puzzles, often by moving obstacles such as barrels, and fetch quests during which players need to fetch specific items for specific non-player characters. If one applies the double dialectic of Bernaerts et al. here, it is quite clear that the gameplay mechanics foreground human experientiality. However, the gameplay mechanics nevertheless play a big part in simulating ‘what it is like’ to be a cat in the world of Stray, or of becoming-cat, following Deleuze and Guattari. Becoming-animal, in this context, describes “the capacity to affect and be affected” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 261). Playing a cat in Stray, coupled with the game’s lack of human characters, could be considered a process of the player entering a “zone of proximity” (273) with the nonhuman avatar that discards anthropocentric notions of gaming. Becoming in video games, therefore, is not merely based on visual triggers of affect (such as the - from a human perspective - cuteness of Stray’s cat),but closely connected to agency. As described by Melissa Bianchi, players, “when in assemblage with game machines (through avatars, interfaces, etc.), […] undergo becoming as they recognise how their actions do and do not act in accordance with the machine’s programme” (2017: 139). While doing so, “video games facilitate becoming when players identify themselves, their avatars, and the avatars’ algorithmic limitations as parts of an assemblage that enables play” (139). Without pressing any button, players of Stray can move their feline avatar through tight spaces, which conveys the suppleness and agility of cats well, thus following the general assumption that cats can wriggle through any opening they can get their head through. The cat in Stray can effortlessly move along narrow ledges or across steel girders, and again the player is not required to press an additional button or keep the gamepad in balance in order to simulate the act of balancing in the game world. Furthermore, jumping is a notorious problem in many video games, especially in 3D games because distances and timing are often difficult to estimate. Stray also has a solution for this. First, the player’s avatar always stops at edges (i.e., one can never accidentally fall down anywhere); second, a small icon indicates where one can jump to by simply pressing the corresponding button on the gamepad, and the jump itself requires no specific timing or aiming beyond that. It is, in other words, very easy and fun to let the cat move like a ‘real’ cat, and this fosters empathy on the player’s part. The easy-to-control and foolproof jumping is an essential part of the game, mainly because Stray plays heavily on verticality. The game thrives on the fact that, as a cat, one often gets stuck in places that humans can easily pass through, for example DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 222 Raphael Zähringer 4 Ironically, the official game description claims the very opposite: “See the world through the eyes of a cat and interact with the environment in powerful ways” (BlueTwelve Studio 2012: n.p.). because a door is locked. In these cases, players are asked to look around and find an alternative route that involves jumping to places that human beings would be unable to access in this manner. Thus, Stray pits the alienation of playing a nonhuman character moving in nonhuman ways against the very familiar experientiality of cyberpunk aesthetics as seen through human eyes. 4 The neon-lit alleys of Walled City 99, which advertise all kinds of services and products associated with neoliberal consumption, go hand in hand with the dull grey of the buildings and the many dead ends packed with trash. These observations tie in with recent developments in video game studies related to architecture which claim that spaces in video games are more than simulations of space that create a specific atmosphere. They are “constructed environments” that facilitate “embedded relationships among objects that enable dynamic experiences” (Squire and Jenkins 2002: 65). While Walled City 99 is inspired by the Walled City of Kowloon - an actual, man-made place - “the novelty of the game comes from the fact that it challenges the pervasive anthropocentric game design approaches” (Khalili and Ma 2022: 28) that can be found in the myriads of games in which we control human or anthropomorphic avatars. Within the confines of a (formerly) human cityscape, Stray draws upon what Roudavski calls “Interspecies Design”; it “rejects speciesism” (2021: 156) by restricting its players to distinctly nonhuman means of coming to terms with this space; hence, nonhuman experientiality is foregrounded. Furthermore, one can interact with the game world in an explicitly playful manner, which does not bring the player closer to the goal of the game, but rather further emphasises the feline nature of the main character. The cat can meow (again, the pressing of a single button is necessary), which has no actual effect on the game world; the game also offers various locations in which the player can let the cat scratch surfaces (doors, carpets, and trees); and, while the cat does not need to rest, there are various sofas, cushions, blankets, or robots’ laps where players can make the cat curl up comfortably at the touch of a button. The cat can be moved across piano keys as well as computer keyboards (the former has an auditory effect, the latter a visual one as numbers and lines of code appear on the screen to which the keyboard is connected). Last, the player can also make the cat put its head in a paper bag, which makes it significantly harder to control for a few seconds - this reflects the well-known fascination that cats have with paper (as well as those moments, humorous from a human perspective, when these otherwise graceful and self-determined creatures get themselves into trouble). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray 223 5 For reasons of space, I can only refer to the potentially striking parallels between third-person perspective in video games and third-person narration in narrative fiction against the conceptual backdrop of free indirect affect (Houen 2020). These examples of popular knowledge about cats, as promoted in Stray, can be said to create “unequal power relations” (Smith 2024: 3) between human player and nonhuman avatar, specifically when investigating it “through the concept of companion species. Human concepts of human-nonhuman companionship (e.g., pets, service animals, wildlife) define our design and play of nonhuman identity tourism” (Smith 2024: 3). When interpreted critically, the interaction options described are primarily intended to entertain the player by allowing them to make the cat do things that amuse them or subjugate the cat - just like we know from the proverbial cat videos that are part and parcel of online meme culture. On the other hand, the many opportunities of engaging purposelessly - or autotelically (Sicart 2014: 16) - with the game world are an essential part of the way Stray evokes empathy: it is simply a wonderful (albeit human) experience to see the cat do all the things cats are cherished for. In summary, it can be said that Stray places great emphasis on nonhuman perspectives in its game mechanics. The game never claims to simulate what it is ‘really’ like to be a cat. It is not about doing justice to, say, our scientific knowledge about cats. Thus, scholarly claims that nonhuman gameplay offers merely identity tourism are somewhat justified. Since players control Stray‘s feline main protagonist within the epistemologically safe setup provided by conventional gameplay, the central nonhuman perspective offers an “identity tour as a manageable tour and not an enforced reality” (Smith 2024: 6). However, considering the game’s apparently minor but impactful tweaks to gameplay conventions, Stray goes further than other games in its attempt to forge a cyborg relationship between player and avatar (and computer/ game console). Apart from that, the question also arises as to how far one can shift the balance of cyborgian play towards the nonhuman part. A completely ‘cat-centric’ game would probably be neither possible nor playable. Instead, Stray is about making popular knowledge about cats tangible and translating it into a nonhuman perspective in the sense that one plays a cat, but still experiences it and its en‐ vironment primarily from the human player's point of view. 5 The world depicted follows the conventions of third-person action games and, particularly in terms of visual design, those of the literary and aesthetic tradition of cyberpunk and postapocalyptic fiction. Within this framework, which is extremely accessible to players because they can draw upon their knowledge of established video game types and settings, the game allows nonhuman perspectives to be experienced, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 224 Raphael Zähringer particularly in the interaction between different species. This will be the subject of the following section. Cats and posthuman empathy Stray is set in a postapocalyptic world in which no human beings appear to exist anymore. The opening cutscene depicts an industrial area partially reclaimed by nature: the Outside, the home of the game’s feline protagonist and its pack, which is also populated by pigeons, monarch butterflies, and other wildlife. The first thing the player can make the cat do in the game - apart from running - is to let the cat play with another cat’s tail. With a second one, the cat can briefly wrestle, and with a third one, it can briefly let it lick the feline protagonist’s fur. From the outset, Stray makes it clear that interpersonal relationships are at the forefront. Here, the intertwining of experientiality and empathy becomes clear: Even though the player is denied access to the pack's consciousness, the interaction between the cats (controlled by the player) provides an emotion-based opportunity for becoming. After just a few minutes of gameplay, however, the protagonist is separated from its three fellow felines and falls into the abandoned remains of a human city. From here on, it operates as a liminal figure - neither fully autonomous nor entirely dependent. It embodies agency by its aforementioned means of moving through, and interacting with, the game world (jumping, running, scratching, etc.) that oscillate between curiosity, survival, and silent empathy (as expressed in its interactions with its pack) as different types of instinctual behaviour. Since the cat cannot speak, the player is forced to engage with the game world through action rather than dialogue (until later in the game, that is; see below). Intrapersonally, Stray is driven by its protagonist’s primal desire for belonging since the goal of the game is to reunite with the pack. This desire is externally shaped by the cat’s vulnerability. While the protagonist can only truly die when attacked by the mutated Zurks or the robotic Sentinels (see below), the game world presents itself as similarly liminal as the protagonist itself. The overgrown, green surroundings at the beginning convey the feeling that feral cats have found a home here in a post-anthropocentric world. The post-apocalyptic Outside represents a lost environment of simplicity and safety in which “there is indeed the promise of a ‘post-’, an ‘after’ - a post-humanity” (Smith 2024: 16) that nevertheless symbolises a more universal need for community that hinges on empathy. The cat’s separation from its pack establishes an intrapersonal conflict that strikes closer to the anthropocentric tension between individual survival and collective identity. The cat’s quest to reunite with the pack mirrors broader DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray 225 existential themes of displacement and the search for belonging in a fractured world - despite this search being presented in the form of a conventional video game quest structure that asks players to manoeuvre their avatar through levels and architectural puzzles. This becomes particularly clear at the moment of separation. The cats in the pack jump one after the other over a gap between two pipes high above the ground. With each jump, the pipe on which they land sinks a little further, indicating that the connection is about to break. After a moment's hesitation, the protagonist jumps last, the pipe sinks considerably further, and they lose their balance. The protagonist falls and hangs for a few seconds on a lower edge. In a highly emotional moment, the cutscene switches from a close-up of the protagonist, whose face is contorted with fear (see figure 2), to a reverse shot of the pack (see figure 3), which can only watch helplessly as the protagonist loses their footing and plunges into a black abyss. It is a heartbreaking (albeit predictable) moment in which human and nonhuman experientiality intersect. This cutscene underscores how nonhuman social structures such as feline hierarchies and loyalty parallel human ones, blurring the line between species in their emotional resonance - all the more so, of course, because in the opening sequence a few gameplay minutes earlier, a lot of effort was put into building the player’s empathy for their avatar and its pack. Despite the fact that the player can only watch rather than play this moment of separation, the emphasis clearly is on interspecies empathy. Fig. 2: Personal in-game screenshot from chapter 1 (Inside the Wall). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 226 Raphael Zähringer 6 Two examples for this continuation are the Companions Alexander and Moka. The former is a poet and is one of many artists (including painters and actors, among others) populating Walled City 99. While his art is inevitably caught up in human concepts of writing poetry, he is nevertheless trying to find his own poetic voice (his work “Thee, mighty concrete, shielding me in its womb, shall you also be my tomb? ” obviously uses rhyme and metaphors; Stray: / DIAL_ANTVILLAGE_POET_01_C). The latter, Moka, demonstrates that the Companions are not necessarily restricted to continue their original role, but can develop and transform their identity: “I was a bellbot many cycles ago, but I’ve repurposed myself into a treasure hunter” (Stray: DIAL_ANTVILLAGE_TRASH1_01_A). Fig. 3: Personal in-game screenshot from chapter 1 (Inside the Wall). From cats to circuits: Stray’s companions After the protagonist’s separation from their pack, the following main part of the game is to find a way back. While doing so, the protagonist meets numerous humanoid robots (tellingly called Companions) living in the remains of the human city. The robots are aware that they are robots, not humans. As the story progresses, it is revealed that the city was once built as a refuge for humanity from a catastrophe on the surface, i.e., on the Outside. However, an unspecified pandemic or plague wiped out humankind. The robots, initially created as autonomous cleaners devoid of any personality, continue to live in the city, tending to distinctly human tasks (cultivating plants, hanging around in bars, playing the guitar, bartering on markets, painting, among many others). They consider themselves the descendants of humans and inhabit a society that has developed from mimicking to continuing human culture. 6 While the player is never granted direct access to any Companion’s thought processes, the game designers tried to convey the impression that the Companions have DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray 227 7 The robotic drone B-12, the feline protagonist’s sidekick, speculates that “[m]aybe somehow they evolved by mimicking humans” (Stray: TAB_Memories/ MEM‐ ORY_FOOD). consciousness, feelings, and different personalities. 7 The Companions wear different kinds of clothing, they gossip about each other, and assign each other different personality traits. In addition, they are equipped with screens where human beings would have faces; these screens display various colours and emoticons that represent corresponding emotions (see figure 4). Fig. 4: Personal in-game screenshot from chapter 4 (The Slums). It is precisely these similarities with humans that make it easy for players to feel empathy for the Companions. This is due to the fact that, in their (seemingly) mindless continuation of human behaviour, they remind us of ourselves. They express their individuality in clothing, but are all made of metal and circuits; they all assume different social roles (shopkeeper, customer, homeless) without forming a community and seem to lead single lives; they are well aware of their dire living conditions in a city after ecological collapse, but are caught up in the boundlessness of neoliberal consumption. They are our Other not only because they imitate us, but because they live in the waste left by us, and waste is a crucial Other of Western culture (Morrison 2013: 464). Smith criticises this perpetuation of human individuality within the ideological and epistemological confines of neoliberalism. While she “does not argue that individuality itself is bad for society” (2024: 15), she problematises the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 228 Raphael Zähringer fact that Stray unquestionably values individuality over other forms of social existence. Against this backdrop, the Companion’s individualism and way of imitating/ continuing human concepts of being and identity becomes yet another nail in the coffin of a more nuanced reflection of posthuman play: “The robots, here, carry on contemporary iterations of neoliberal human culture, values, and concepts of love and community, revering humanity in the process and showing them gratitude for their creation by making human ways their nonhuman ways” (13). However, by drawing upon a few examples, I would like to demonstrate that the interactions between the player’s avatar and the humanoid robots especially, while lacking biological warmth, hinge on an interspecies dynamics that bridges ontological divides. The relation between the feline protagonist and a Companion group called the Outsiders is central to the story. The player first finds a Companion called Momo inside his apartment high up in an area called The Slums (chapter 4 of 12). When they interact with him, it becomes very clear that Momo feels lonely and depressed. His screen shows a sad smiley face, his shoulders are slumped, and he calls the feline protagonist’s quest to find the Outside “a waste of time” that “will bring you only loneliness and despair” (Stray; see figure 4). Momo is a member of the Outsiders (the other members being Clementine, Doc, and Zbaltazar), who oppose the institutional power structures - embodied by robotic Sentinels - of Walled City 99 and are willing to reach the Outside. There are various indicators that the Outsiders are a group of their own within the city: they created a logo for their group (a sad face) that can be found on their badges and in the form of graffiti throughout the Slums, wrote a manifesto which outlines the group’s goal to find the Outside, and took a group photo in Momo’s apartment. Momo lives alone in a messy flat crammed with objects that remind him of the good times with the Outsiders - again highlighting the game designers’ efforts to elicit human empathy for a nonhuman form of existence. The Outsiders, while adhering to neoliberal individualism simply by insisting that they are individuals, nevertheless represent, and strive for, its very opposite: stepping outside of this order they were created in. Clementine, for instance, is clearly cast as a rebel figure, so much so that she, having teamed up with the cat, is arrested and put into jail. Zbaltazar, whom the cat encounters in Antvillage, has taken to meditation as a means to let his mind roam free. In this way, Zbaltazar demonstrates another possibility for formulating individuality as an alternative to neoliberal capitalist concepts. He has explicitly renounced a fundamental concept of capitalist thinking: When the player tries to give him an item from their inventory, Zbaltazar answers: “What now? I’m not in‐ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray 229 terested in worldly possessions” (Stray: / DIAL_GERARD_03). The interspecies dynamics between cat and Companion is most impactful in the development of Momo. Unlike the other three group members, Momo, afraid to head into the Zurk-infested Sewers, stayed in the Slums, and stopped believing that they would ever reach the outside. From the point when the player meets Momo the first time, the feline protagonist functions as a catalyst: As they bring Momo the notebooks of the other Outsiders, his belief and hope are bolstered, and the cooperation between cat and Companion carries the entire weight of the game’s middle part (chapters 4-7). With the Outsiders’ notes, Momo manages to fix a transceiver; he sends the cat to install the transceiver on the Rooftops (chapter 5), and the two meet again in the Dufer Bar, where Momo manages to establish a radio link to Zbaltazar (chapter 6). Zbaltazar in turn has found a safe zone outside of the Slums (Antvillage), but one must go through the Sewers to get there. Momo and the cat find the entrance in the Dead City and reach the Sewer entrance at the end of the chapter of the same name (chapter 7). The chapter ends with Momo waiting for the cat on a raft. They enter the Sewers, and Momo explicitly states: “I’ve never been this far out of the Slums. With you here, I’m not even scared” (Stray: / DIAL_MOMOBOAT_01_A). Soon, however, they come upon a lock that can only be opened manually and, because it will close very quickly, Momo must stay behind. He says goodbye, keeping the lock open for the cat as long as he can, his spirits rekindled: “Gnn… I can’t go on with you but… Hmpf… I won’t stop looking for a way” (Stray: / DIAL_MOMODOOR_04_A). His final words before cat and Companion are separated recall the group dynamics of the Outsiders, demonstrating that Momo still cares about them and his position among them: “When you find Zbaltazar and Clementine, tell them I was brave” (Stray: / DIAL_MOMODOOR_04_B). While one must concede that bravery is a human concept, the relationship between cat and Companion allows us to explore ourselves in relation to non- human lifeforms: their alliance demonstrates the advantages of interspecies collaboration towards a shared goal. Momo’s development clearly shows what interpersonal relationships can achieve: through his encounter with the cat, his motivation has returned, he sees himself as part of a group again, and looks ahead. By introducing unpredictability, an impulse literally coming from the Outside, the feline protagonist challenges Momo’s reliance on rigid structures, nudging him and other Companions to collaborative problem-solving. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 230 Raphael Zähringer B-12’s transhumanism With the introduction of a non-player character called B-12, a disembodied voice that at first appears to be an artificial intelligence, Stray also explores notions of transhumanism. B-12 resides in the city’s digital network. The cat meets B-12 in The Flat (chapter 3) and together they form a team for the rest of the game. As it turns out, the aforementioned arrows and messages guiding the player on their first steps into Walled City 99 were B-12’s way of making contact. Upon their first encounter, the player must help B-12 to transfer their consciousness into a small robotic drone. From this point onwards, the cat and B-12 operate as buddies. The latter grants the player access to additional abilities for letting the cat interact with the game world. B-12 can translate Companions’ speech and writing, light dark areas, hack door security systems, store and examine items inside a harness for the cat to wear, and can be asked for help on the current task. Thus, B-12 functions like many other small buddies that are commonplace in video games, the best-known one probably being Navi from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), a fairy who also acts as both a companion and guide to the hero Link. This kind of buddy system enhances the (human) experientiality of the game (by providing more possibilities for interacting with the game world). B-12 is a guide to both character and player, a conversation partner, and the talkative part of a duo of unlikely heroes. The relationship between the cat and B-12 is deeply symbiotic since it goes beyond the gameplay-related possibilities offered by the drone. Throughout the game, the player comes across certain spots and items that unlock B-12’s memories. As B-12 explains, his memories are corrupt; when cat and drone meet for the first time, the latter only remembers that they were with a human scientist after the rest of humankind had abandoned the city, and that they promised to open the city to the Outside. At this point, B-12 clearly considers himself and the scientist to be separate entities. The twenty-six memories that can be unlocked while playing Stray (five of which are automatically triggered; the rest are optional and hence not required for a complete playthrough), bit by bit, reveal fragments of both the game world and B-12’s backstory and identity. For instance, B-12 recalls that the malignant Zurks were created by a tech corporation as a means of getting rid of waste through mutated bacteria, but that the project went awry after the disappearance of the humans (Stray: TAB_Memories/ MEMORY_NECO). Furthermore, B-12 retrieves memories of the time he spent at the scientist’s side, such as playing video games (Stray, TAB_Memories/ MEMORY_VIDEOGAMES) or the scientist’s dream of retiring to a cottage in the countryside (Stray: TAB_Memories/ MEMORY_COTTAGE). It is in Antvillage (chapter 9) that B-12’s true identity is revealed: He is, or was, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray 231 8 B-12’s self-conception draws upon the transhumanist idea of human augmentation so that human beings may become more than human - in this case, by means of a machine that preserves human consciousness: “Was it? It was. Me. I was the scientist. I was human” (Stray, TAB_Memories/ MEMORY_MAIN3; original emphasis). the scientist. This turn of events casts B-12 not as an artificial intelligence, as one may have assumed at the beginning of Stray, but as transhuman, i.e., as an entity whose human identity is retained through technology, hence blurring the line between organic and synthetic life (Thomas 2024). 8 He attempted to upload his consciousness into a computer and the city network, but something went wrong - hence the fragmented memory. During the last chapters, B-12 recalls more snippets from his human existence, for instance about his friends and family. He misses feeling, in a physical sense. Despite the significant memory loss, he is clearly not only self-aware but also empathic as the mind within the drone’s hull is humanised by the interaction with the cat. The very moment of the revelation makes this quite clear: B-12’s realisation that he is of human origin proves to be so overwhelming that, for a few minutes, the game denies the player the oppor‐ tunity to interact with B-12, which is otherwise possible throughout: “I… I need a moment”, as B-12 states (Stray: TAB_Memories/ MEMORY_MAIN3). One may criticise that this adds yet another rather anthropocentric perspective because of who B-12 is and how he still clings to the remnants of his human existence as an individual. Nevertheless, the retrieval of his identity meaningfully reflects on notions of transhumanism which, according to B-12, lacks biological warmth since the network that he attempted to upload himself to is dark and lonely (Stray: / DIAL_B12_ENDSEWERS01_A). It is a warning that interconnectedness, in a digital sense, as well as the evolution of mankind postulated by progressive strands of transhuman thinking, are not desirable after all (McKibben 2003). Hiveminds As mentioned previously, the disappearance of human beings in the world of Stray is linked to the creation of the Zurks, who developed from trash-eating bacteria that were initially created by humans as a solution to the city’s litter pollution. Accordingly, they can consume trash, metal, plastic, but also flesh and other materials. Apart from a few smaller animals that populate Walled City 99 (moths and spiders), the Zurks are the only organic lifeform that can be found within the city. They are small, bug-like creatures whose visual representation hinges on defamiliarisation: They have wrinkled skin, a single lidless, glowing eyeball, spiky legs, and their teeth are curved inward. They hatch from eggs and make sounds that, in human terms, come close to squeaking. Thus, they DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 232 Raphael Zähringer have certain attributes that make them appear to be insects or creepy-crawlies. This contrasts with the ‘beautiful animals’ from a human perspective that can be admired in the Outside at the beginning of the game, and of course with cats as pet animals that are close(r) to humans. In other words, Stray perpetuates man-made socio-ecological constructions of different types of animals along the lines of binaries such as “animal/ human, nature/ culture, organic/ technical, and wild/ domestic” - categories “in which animals end up permanent dependents (‘lesser humans’), utterly natural (‘nonhuman’), or exactly the same (‘humans in fur suits’)” (Haraway 2008: 15; 67). The game denies the player any insight into the Zurks’ perspective; hence, there is no nonhuman experientiality. As far as one can judge from the outside, they behave like a swarm intelligence and are presented as the main enemies of the game. When encountering the cat in sufficient numbers, they relentlessly attack it, and the player’s only option is to let the cat run away. When the cat takes damage from the Zurks’ attacks, the screen turns red - a conventional sign of danger in video games. Hence, the Zurks are presented as “a type of nonhuman lifeform not to be extended companionship but to be treated as unnatural, horrifying, and abject” (Smith 2024: 14). On the one hand, this representation of the Zurks can be considered a wasted opportunity of giving the player an idea of a very different nonhuman perspective. However, given that they are man-made, I would not read them as the embodiment of a loss of individuality, and hence as a counterpoint to a “ne‐ oliberal capitalist triumph of individuality, in that […] human self-consciousness is superior to a supposed lack of self-consciousness in other, nonhuman entities” (Smith 2024: 14). Instead, I suggest to read the Zurks as the very outcome of neoliberal capitalism, as its own mindless consumption. Even if capitalism sells the myth of individuality, it thrives on creating faceless masses of consumers. Thus, the Zurks are not neoliberal capitalism’s counterpoint, but its logical endpoint. This becomes particularly clear in view of the fact that capitalism’s commodities are “deferred trash” (Stallabrass 2009: 407). After all, they were engineered by the Neco Corporation, the overarching power structure of Walled City 99. Even more so than the Companions, their presence highlights the “cavalier disregard for all the wasted things that form an enormous part of this way of living” (Hawkins 2006: 15) that, when resurfacing, are viewed as a threatening Other. When evolved beyond their extended function, they escaped control and started to consume everything indiscriminately - including the very system that created them. This mirrors capitalism’s core contradiction: It promises progress and individuality but generates crises (here: alienation and ecological collapse) that threaten its own existence. Waste always returns (e.g., in the form of microplastic or air pollution), and the Zurks embody this return. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray 233 They represent the repressed waste of capitalism that evolves into an existential threat. Their mindless consumption of all materials is capitalism’s own logic - growth at all costs - turned against its creators. The fact that the Companions perpetuate human capitalism by maintaining its logics of consumption and individualism only adds to Stray’s tragedy. Conclusion Stray can be read in conjunction with one the fundamental insights of Bernaerts et al. in regard to nonhuman narratives: “What is often at stake in non-human narration is the ability to acknowledge similarity and otherness at the same time” (2014: 74) - in this case, to recognise the catness of the cat, the robotness of the Companions as well as the catness and the robotness of humans. In terms of visualisation and gameplay, it is a largely conventional game; nevertheless, it can be said to have innovative features pointing towards posthuman play. While the game is not narrated by a nonhuman entity, players experience it through a nonhuman entity; beyond the generation of narrative interest (Sternberg 1978), this - literal - change of perspective “can destabilise anthropocentric ideologies” by placing these nonhuman perspectives “on a continuum with humans, rather than constructing them as opposites” (Bernaerts et al. 2014: 74). Through play‐ ing-cat, players of Stray also interact with the robotic Companions in a unique way. The avatar’s catness, in its physical difference that emphasises interspecies empathy, bridges the ontological divide between animal and humachines, as is visible in the development of Momo. Furthermore, the symbiotic relationship between the cat and B-12 questions the ostensible prospects of transhumanism. All of this occurs within the confines of what commercial video games make possible. It is clear that the game incorporates nonhuman perspectives; however, these are always considered from the perspective of the player - and thus the human being who ultimately retains control over everything. At the same time, Stray denies insight into the consciousness of the Zurks. However, the accusation that the game is entirely committed to neoliberal capitalist concepts cannot be upheld. Despite the fact that individuals are at the forefront here and act largely individualistically (unique Companions, B-12's self-sacrifice), and despite the fact that network-like consciousness or swarm intelligence have negative connotations, liberation from neoliberalism and capitalism does not come through ‘good individuals’ (Companions and drones mimicking humans) - but from breaking the cycle of extraction. The Zurks, the evil Other of Stray, embody the ultimate manifestation of human violence towards the environment and itself. The game’s open ending - showing the cat reach the Outside again, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 234 Raphael Zähringer but leaving it open whether the cat will reconnect with their pack - cannot be considered a victory of individualism, but a fugitive escape from the system itself. Works Cited Bernaerts, Lars/ Caracciolo, Marco/ Herman, Luc/ Vervaeck, Bart. 2014. “The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators”. Narrative 22/ 1, 68-93. Bianchi, Melissa. 2017. “Inklings and Tentacled Things: Grasping Kinship through Video Games”. Ecozona 8/ 2, 136-150. BlueTwelve Studio. 2022. Stray. Annapurna Interactive. Deleuze, Gilles/ Guattari, Félix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Domsch, Sebastian. 2013. Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games. Berlin/ Bos‐ ton: De Gruyter. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. 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Roudavski, Stanislav. 2021. “Interspecies Design”. In: Parham, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 147-162. Ruberg, Bonnie. 2020. “Empathy and Its Alternatives: Deconstructing the Rhetoric of ‘Empathy’ in Video Games”. Communication, Culture and Critique 13/ 1, 54-71. Sicart, Miguel. 2014. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 From Cats to Circuits: Nonhuman Perspectives in Stray 235 Smith, Caighlan. 2024. “Of Cyborgs and Cats: Nonhuman Companionship and the Specter of Humanity in NieR: Automata and Stray”. Journal of Games Criticism 6/ A, 1-17. Squire, Kurt/ Jenkins, Henry. 2002. “The Art of Contested Spaces”. In: King, Lucien, ed. Game On: The History and Culture of Videogames. London: Laurence King, 65-75. Stallabrass, Julian. 2009. “Trash”. In: Candlin, Fiona/ Guins, Raiford, eds. The Object Reader. London: Routledge, 406-424. Sternberg, Meir. 1978. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Thomas, Alexander. 2024. The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism: Techno-Human Evolution and Advanced Capitalism. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Vindigni, Giovanni. 2025. Grundwissen Game Studies und Ludologie. Stuttgart: UTB. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0011 236 Raphael Zähringer Material Perspectives Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) Sina Schuhmaier Introduction: Pandemic literature and the microbial turn We find ourselves in the midst of a ‘microbial turn’. Public thinking is gradually shifting from a nineteenth century paradigm of germ warfare to a recognition of microbial biodiversity and mutual interdependencies. The recent (re-)discovery of the human microbiome and trending gut health are the most apparent illustrations of this shift. But even potentially harmful pathogens are undergoing a critical reassessment, despite the persistence of military metaphors and defence mechanisms in the recent Covid-19 pandemic, when politicians like the French president Emmanuel Macron declared war against the pathogen (BBC 2020) and national borders were closed. What the pandemic also demonstrated was the inextricable entanglement of human existence with microbial forms. In this vein, Jonathan Kennedy’s popular science book Pathogenesis (2023) calls for a reorientation in the category of the human and the writing of ‘human’ history. Kennedy suggests that germs chart a “history from deep below” which decentres not only ‘Great Men’ but human actors altogether (2023: 15 f.). The challenge to human exceptionalism that this soft version of non-anthropocen‐ trism articulates is matched by the material turn in the humanities. Critical posthumanism, new materialism, and material ecocriticism are all invested in a perspective that redefines and decentres the human, emphasising various material entanglements and nonhuman agencies instead. The ‘microbial turn’ has, in fact, been proposed by critical posthumanism in an attempt to recon‐ ceptualise “human and animal bodies as human-non-human-environmental ‘ecosystems’” (Herbrechter 2018: 360). This view of altered scales and microbial cohabitation can powerfully translate into a “postanthropocentric ‘multispecies’ ethics, politics and ecology” (356). While this paper reserves some scepticism as to the more radical anti-anthropocentrism that also derives from the microbial turn (362 f.), it takes its cue from the shift in perspective that a focus on the microbial engenders. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 1 The Royal Society, in fact, showed an interest in finding the plague pathogen by means of the microscope (Nicolson 1962: 164). Pandemic literature, in this view, emerges as perhaps uniquely suited to probe a perspective which has always been latent in human interactions with the microbial. Even texts that predate the age of germ discovery in the midand late-nineteenth century provide insights into the entanglement of human life with microbial forms which becomes especially apparent under pandemic conditions. This is not to say that the microbial perspective is historically unspecific. Situated medical and scientific knowledge gives specific contours to the literary imagination. The introduction of the first microscopes in the early modern age presented a dramatically altered scale of life. The view through the microscope, while instating the human as an omnipotent observer, came with the simultaneous potential of challenging a human-centred perspective. To Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who described microorganisms as ‘animalcules’, little animals, in the seventeenth century, the microscope put on display a “secret world” of hidden multitudes (qtd. in Nicolson 1962: 167). Concerned with the minute details of inanimate and organic matter, Robert Hooke’s preceding Micrographia (1665) provided visual illustrations of this previously invisible world in the same year as the Great Plague raged over London. 1 The 1665 bubonic plague is also the subject matter of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year from 1722, a fictional work which yet bears the hallmark of facticity. Although unaware of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, Defoe’s text, as I will show, charts a distinct microbial perspective, one that not only sheds light on the material entanglements that undergird human interactions, but also on the textuality of microbial matter itself. My reading is oriented through approaches in new materialism and material ecocriticism that query dichotomies between the nonhuman and human, nature and culture, and, in particular, matter and text. Driven by the thinking of critics like Jane Bennett who have offered powerful reformulations of mate‐ rial and human agency, this paper employs the microbial perspective in an attempt to understand the Great Plague in Defoe’s text as an intertwinement of human and more-than-human forces in networks that ultimately question the clear-cut separation of these categories. The caveat to this reading is that Defoe’s pandemic text from 1722 is not only a textual artefact and so can only access material phenomena through language; it is also greatly concerned with language and storytelling. And yet, I argue, it is precisely through this concern with the plague as discursive-and-material that the text voices a challenge to the ontological distinction between matter and discourse. The plague, in DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 240 Sina Schuhmaier the text, is simultaneously a microbiological and a social, cultural, discursive event. Approached through a microbial perspective that takes due account of material-discursive entwinement, Defoe’s Journal shows that “matter and meaning cannot be dissociated” and that “[m]attering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance” (Barad 2007: 3). Following Karen Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’, the plague does not precede its textuality: “in contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action” (33). What emerges from this take on Defoe’s text is not an entirely nonhuman perspective. Rather, I aim to show that the Journal can be understood to call into question the idea of a purely human perspective, as well as its ensuing anthropocentric implications. In the early 1720s, when Britain was facing the threat of a renewed plague outbreak by way of Marseilles, Defoe made the plague the central topic in two of his works. He published the Journal and the socio-medical manual Due Preparations for the Plague a month apart from each other in 1722. Although the Journal, which has received a disproportionally higher amount of critical attention, is generally understood to be the more literary work - narrated as an eye-witness account by the character “H. F.” - this text, besides famously including a number of statistics, also contains medical commentary. Embodying the scientific mind of a time when the theory of contagion - as opposed to humoral or miasmatic paradigms - had become more popular (Harris 2013: 15 f.), Defoe’s narrator is an astute observer of infection. In line with historical interpretations of the London plague, H. F. attributes the primary cause of the pandemic (like the Great Fire in the succeeding year) to divine providence, the “Hand of God” (Defoe 1992: 152). But he also, “like his contemporaries in the Royal Society, wants to understand the material world and discover causes” (Backscheider 1992: xi). The narrator leaves no doubt that “the Calamity was Spread by Infection, that is to say, by some certain Steams, or Fumes, […] by the Breath, or by the Sweat, or by the Stench of the Sores” (Defoe 1992: 64). The disease, thus, is “propagated by natural Means” through contagion: “in the ordinary Way of Infection from some Body, or the Cloaths, or touch, or Stench of some Body that was infected before” (153). Lacking later knowledge of the transmission of bubonic and septicemic plague by fleas, H. F. still formulates an accurate theory of (mostly airborne) contagion, carried by material vectors DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 241 2 For H. F.’s theory of contagion, see also Healy. Linking his medical theory with the political context of 1722, she argues that H. F.’s reflections on contagion “do seem to function to support many (though not all) of the provisions of the tottering Whig administration’s new Quarantine Act” (2003: 37). 3 H. F. also rejects germ theory, which he considers as too fantastic, “living Creatures [as] seen by a microscope of strange monstrous and frightful Shapes, such as Dragons, Snakes, Serpents, and Devils, horrible to behold: But this I very much question the Truth of ” (159). and passed from body to body. 2 Doing so, he rejects the prevalent theory of miasma, i.e., pestilent air, as the cause of infection itself, and emphasises the transcorporeal nature of disease transmission. 3 Human corporeality here becomes, in Stacy Alaimo’s words, a transcorporeality “in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world” (2010: 2). The plague, in Defoe’s text, functions as a striking example of the material interactions that human bodies are inevitably engaged in. If the Journal thus renders questionable the separation between the human and ‘inanimate’ matter, it also draws attention to the textual composition of materiality itself. H. F.’s choice of words in the above quotations is instructive. The plague is both “propagated” as an infectious pathogen and as an idea. Infection is received from “some Body”, a person, but simultaneously from another body (threatening, by implication, the entire body social). This oscillation between literal and figurative language is a key characteristic of the text. Language, in the Journal, is contagious. One of the many stories which H. F. self-reflexively relates of his fellow Londoners centres on a man called John Hayward and his wife. Hayward, in H. F.’s account, never used any Preservative against the Infection, other than holding Garlick and Rue in his mouth, and smoking Tobacco; this I also had from his own Mouth; and his Wife’s Remedy was washing her Head in vinegar […]; and if the smell of any of those she waitd on was more than ordinary Offensive, she snuft Vinegar up her nose, and sprinkled Vinegar upon her Head-Cloths, and held a Handkerchief wetted with Vinegar to her Mouth. (Defoe 1992: 75) The means of avoiding infection are specifically linked to the nose, human hands (used for smoking and to hold a handkerchief), and, especially, the mouth. At the same time, H. F. vouches for the veracity of the story by insisting that he heard it from the man’s “own mouth”, by direct word of mouth. The proverbial here is literal, and the literal makes for figurative meanings. One linguistic choice creates the other, and both are semantically linked by a disease that is presumed to rely on oral transmission in both senses. The language makes a case for material ecocriticism’s premise that “[a]ll matter […] is a ‘storied matter’. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 242 Sina Schuhmaier It is a material ‘mesh’ of meanings, properties, and processes, in which human and nonhuman players are interlocked in networks that produce undeniable signifying forces” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 1 f.). The Journal, I argue, shows the material and the discursive to be indissolubly intertwined. While previous scholarship has extensively commented on Defoe’s use of plague metaphors (e.g. Dückmann Gallagher 2021), this paper will further explore these tropes as material metaphors. Susan Sontag has famously argued against the use of metaphors in Illness as Metaphor (1977). She asserts a need to “de-mythicize” disease in order to do away with harmful projections surrounding diseases like cancer. Instead, she holds, disease should be treated as that: “just a disease” (1978: 7). Noelle Dückmann Gallagher’s reading of the Journal presents a challenge to Sontag in that it foregrounds the positive capacities of plague metaphors in Defoe’s text. While Dückmann Gallagher’s insights into the interplay of Defoe’s pandemic subject matter and literary form are valuable, this is not a debate that I want to enter into. Instead, I would contest the idea that metaphors can be removed from either language or the biological reality of disease, as Sontag suggests. In other words, there is no disease-as-such except in the intra-action, as Barad puts it, of material-discursive entwinement. Diseases like the plague are, from the point of view of material ecocriticism, culturally and physically existent, and any clear-cut separation between these planes proves futile. Scholarship, when it pays attention to corporeality in the Journal, tends to proceed by reading the body as an abstraction for social systems. The open or closed body in Kari Nixon’s work, for instance, becomes an emblem of international or isolationist trade. In this paper, I want to direct attention to bodily natures in Defoe’s text - all the while I argue that these do not exist independent of metaphor. Defoe’s material metaphors show abstract interactions to be corporeal and vice versa. By adopting a microbial perspective, I am not arguing for a wholesale privileging of nonhuman agencies over the human, or ecologically ‘utopian’ visions of human extinction through pandemic catastrophe. The human, in the microbial perspective afforded by the Journal, is not entirely abolished - but it is repositioned. Even this argument might appear counterintuitive given that Defoe’s text is firmly rooted in the human perspective of its narrator H. F. and follows the conventions of formal realism with its basis in an empiricist epistemology and premise that “truth can be discovered by the individual through his senses” (Watt 1974: 12). Defoe’s narrator champions a materialist philosophy, but he is certainly not a new materialist, and recent scholarship has DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 243 4 Loar, who attests Defoe’s writing an “ecological orientation” (2019: 329), is an exception to the positions taken by Yağcıoğlu and Ganguly. been sceptical of the novel’s ecological and postanthropocentric affordances. 4 Arguably, H. F. as narrator occupies a “transcendent position” that renders him immune from infection, apparently “autonomous” and “independent from […] non-human environments” (Loar 2019: 43). Hülya Yağcıoğlu maintains that “Defoe’s world is clearly an anthropocentric one in which human beings are at the ontological center of all other species” (2024: 207). Although Yağcıoğlu shares my premise that pandemics hold the potential to “renew our perception of other nonhuman life forms on the planet” and to “make us reconsider how we understand the entities and environments around us and become more attuned to the vitality of the nonhuman world” (204), her concise reading of the Journal denies the novel this potential. In a similar vein, Debjani Ganguly argues that the Journal remains incapable of charting a ‘planetary realism’ suitable to the Anthropocene age. In what follows, I suggest that Defoe’s formal realism is, in fact, co-authored by the nonhuman (which turns out not be categorically nonhuman, after all). The Journal, like other “[p]lague writings in the early 1720s” treats the “plague as a complex environmental phenomenon in which various agents - social, affective, spiritual, and material - mingle promiscuously” (Loar 2019: 42). In this vein, this paper foregrounds how Defoe’s text, alongside its anthropocentric reality effects, relates ‘stories of matter’ (Iovino and Oppermann 2014). Taking up a microbial perspective necessitates “modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, bio‐ logical and textual” (Alaimo 2010: 3). Thus, I will discuss two of Defoe’s most prevalent material metaphors, both concerning primary organs of infection. The focus of the first section is on hands as polysemous material-metaphorical signifiers in the text. In the next section, I will take a closer look at Defoe’s use of the mouth. Both the human hand and mouth have served as powerful vehicles of human exceptionalism, denoting human agency and power. And yet, in the Journal, because they are sites of transcorporeal exchange, these organs also indicate the porosity of the human body and its fantasies of dominion. Hands and mouths in the Journal signal towards a posthumanist rendering of the body - as components of a human corporeality that is yet implicated in human and more-than-human material and social interrelations. As material metaphors, they also record the textual imprint of the microbial, ostensibly nonhuman Other, contributing distinct ‘stories of matter’ to H. F.’s human-authored text. H. F. repeatedly notes that the plague is contracted by DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 244 Sina Schuhmaier 5 “Die Hand ist nicht die handfeste Alternative zur Abstraktion, sondern die handgrei‐ fliche Bedingung ihrer Möglichkeit”. 6 See also Harris for the “constitutive role played by the body in shaping Western perceptions of the economic” - “eighteenth-century French Physiocrat theories of the touch and by conversing, and these material interactions provide the basis for a discursive web that involves interconnected sites of corporeality, commerce, divinity, communication, and contagion. Considering “matter both in texts and as a text” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 2), I will conclude by further probing the Journal’s voicing of a “close kinship between plague and textuality” (Boluk and Lenz 2010: 128) and reciprocally read the Journal as a plague text and the plague as text. (In)visible hands: Plague and commerce Hands, according to Jochen Hörisch, make for a foundational metaphor in Western culture, mediating between the abstract and the concrete. The hand, in his words, “is not the alternative to abstraction, but the tangible condition of its possibility” (2021: 18; my translation). 5 In Defoe’s Journal, which Hörisch briefly discusses (167 f.), it is first and foremost an abstraction that strikes the reader. To explain the plague outbreak, H. F. invokes God’s hand, the “Finger of God” that holds “omnipotent Power” (Defoe 1992: 190). But one characteristic of H. F.’s narration is its epistemological instability (Flynn 2005: 8). The enlightened narrator negotiates between the force of an omnipotent ‘supersubject’ (Hörisch 2021: 163) and human agency in the spread of the disease. When the plague abates, H. F. ascribes this change in circumstance to the “secret invisible Hand of him” (Defoe 1992: 191), and yet, the narrator is equally clear as to the human-made causes of the pandemic, the “Conduct of humane Causes and Effects” (153). H. F. even mocks the “manifest Ignorance and Enthusiasm” of those who “talk of […] an immediate Stroke from Heaven, without the Agency of Means” (64). The ‘stroke’ of agential hands, instead, is to be found in the more mundane realm of everyday interactions with bodies and objects. God’s hand has a material source. Of course, H. F.’s slowly secularising but thoroughly anthropocentric mindset attributes the course of the pandemic to human agency. What his text also exposes, however, are transcorporeal exchanges that form the basis of plague transmission and other forms of socially constructed transactions, in particular commercial trade. Through the figure of hands, Defoe links commerce and disease, two “inter‐ constitutive domains of discourse” in the early modern period (Harris 2013: 3). 6 Commercial relations, in the text, are grasped through the plague, and DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 245 blood-like circulation of wealth; the word ‘inflation’, which was originally a specialized medical term for ‘swelling’; the pathological connotations of ‘consumption’” and so on (2013: 1). the plague, in turn, is conceived in economic terms. Scholars like Dückmann Gallagher offer perceptive insights into Defoe’s alignment of the “spread of disease with the operations of modern commerce, with patterns of transmission running parallel to trade routes, and infections circulating like currency or goods in the marketplace” (2021: 149). In her discussion of a scene that revolves around the attempt to sterilise coins contained in an abandoned purse, Dückmann Gallagher notes how “disease might be literally spread by, as well as figuratively spread in a manner similar to, hard currency” (150). Her focus on Defoe’s metaphorical constructions, however, obstructs further insights into precisely this material basis of disease transmission. Similarly, Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz point out how in Defoe’s text, the “circulation of capital becomes the instrument of plague, as it spreads in the marketplace and trade routes” (2010: 131), but they understand this metaphor of an infectious trade to articulate broader anxieties concerning the rise of capitalism. Jonathan Gil Harris, in his study of early modern mercantilist discourse, argues that as contagion became a more dominant medical model in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the “notion of disease as an invasive entity” was made possible (2013: 15 f.), and that the arena where this notion was tested was that of economic discourse. According to Harris, the language of disease illuminated commercial exchanges, and commercial developments in a globalising age, in turn, illumi‐ nated understandings of disease. Harris presents a nuanced analysis of this discursive linkage, noting that “the early modern English ‘pathologization’ of commerce […] was by no means a straightforward demonization” (21). Still, his analysis remains limited to a largely metaphorical conception of the body which translates bodily nature into border transactions. These perspectives lose sight of the very tangible hands that recur throughout the text and which connect disease and commerce. To retain the material and the figurative dimension of the plague and to think them as intertwined thus remains an important project when it comes to analyses of Defoe’s text. The cross-fertilisation of disease and commerce has a material foundation: Hands function as a material-figurative vehicle for both tenors. Thus, both the plague and the economy are shown to have a ‘bodily nature’, and the body is shown to be a site of disease and commerce. H. F. quite rightly suspects the plague pathogen to survive in traded goods like textiles which, upon manual contact, turn contagious, “dangerous to touch” DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 246 Sina Schuhmaier 7 For metaphors of foreign infection through imported goods, see Dückmann Gallagher (2021: 148 f.). 8 Both vinegar and smoke were thought to sanitise disease environments. H. F. repeatedly gives account of fires lit to fumigate the air. (Defoe 1992: 167). 7 As plague transmission and commodity flows go ‘hand in hand’, consumption in the marketplace becomes a potentially fatal practice. It is the plague, too, that puts a stop to trade: “all Intercourse of Trade for Home Consumption of Manufactures, especially those which usually circulated thro’ the Londoners Hands, was stop’d” (174). Manufactured, literally hand-made, goods no longer circulate through the hands of Londoners, in turn a metaphor for the central marketplace that early modern London was. Defoe’s image of suspended commodity flows all the same shows the hand-based transactions - of goods and pathogens - that are at stake in the national and global marketplace. At several points in the text, the disease is also distinctly linked to money. Money represents abstract financial value but also physically passes through hands. Thus, Londoners become cautious of handling money: “when any one bought a Joint of Meat in the Market, they would not take it off the Butchers Hand, but take it off the Hooks themselves. On the other hand [what else? ], the Butcher would not touch the Money, but have it put into a Pot full of Vinegar” (67). Since money is an extension of the human hand, contact with it requires a purging ritual performed by the disinfectant. In another afore-mentioned scene, H. F. (who is a tradesman himself) encounters three men assembled at a distance around an abandoned purse lying in a yard. Although the men deliberate on how to proceed, “no Body would meddle with it” (87). In the end, one of the men “fetched a pail of Water, and set it down hard by the Purse; then went again, and fetch’d some Gun-powder” to set fire to the purse. 8 By means of a “pair of Tongues”, the man eventually takes hold of the purse and shakes the “Money out into the Pail of Water” (87). Added to the purifying effects of fire and water, direct touch is averted through a - arguably hand-like - prosthesis. To insist on the material nature of economic exchanges, made plain through semantic links with plague transmission, bears a risk of simplification. Neither Defoe in 1722 nor his narrator in 1665 were experiencing a marketplace governed by local craft, manual production, and direct exchange alone, and the text is keenly aware of this. Defoe witnessed an increasingly transnational economy and published his text just two years after the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720. His narrator earns a living by exporting saddles to American colonies (11). The Journal not only discusses both domestic and foreign trade (166); it also, through disease, inscribes a distinct ambivalence of visibility and DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 247 9 For Defoe’s argument for controlled but free trade, see Nixon (2020: 37-52). invisibility into processes of trade. The purse scene, read in this light, shows abstract signifying power to inhere in money: the response of the bystanders reduces the coins to their object status but also re-fetishises them as contagious matter. For one, the novel makes visible the material transactions that undergird economic and financial processes (something that in today’s globalised economy is often rendered invisible); for another, it illustrates economic abstraction and complexity through a disease whose transmission stays invisible. Another eighteenth century metaphor which was to gradually replace the omnipotent hand of God comes into play here: Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market, popularised in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 (Hörisch 2021: 180). 9 The plague in the Journal creates a distorted mirror image of flourishing trade: instead of the open operations of commercial exchange, streets and mar‐ ketplaces remain eerily empty; the city is filled with corpses that are removed and buried during night-time (Defoe 1992: 147), and illicit exports create a “clandestine Trade” (169). The microbial that inspired awe in Leeuwenhoek is also repulsive; it creates an uncanny other world imagined by H. F. when he rejects a method of plague detection whereby a plague sufferer’s breath “upon a piece of Glass” is dissected under the microscope to reveal “strange monstrous and frightful Shapes” (159). As dead carts and plague pits reshape the city and its living inhabitants begin to consider themselves as “all so many dead Corpses” (139), London’s cityscape becomes a ghost map of absent interactions (Löffler 2017: 201-204). Some aspects of economic organisation are thus rendered visible, if ex negativo. For instance, H. F. reflects on the labour of servants who, given their household tasks, are the most exposed to the risks of the marketplace (Defoe 1992: 63). At the same time, though, the text is concerned with what remains invisible. H. F. identifies transmission of the plague as an oftentimes unknowable, invisible process. The reason for this is that the disease is not only passed on by the visibly ill, i.e., those with symptoms, but also, more perfidiously and more threateningly, by “THE WELL” (150). These infected, who “breathed Death in every Place, and upon every Body […], their Hands would infect the Things they touch’d”, are “impossible to know” (151). Neither do they “perfectly know themselves” of their infection (151). As the incubation period turns a person into an unsuspecting “walking Destroyer” (159), the Journal suggests unknowable, invisible elements to reside in the disease-economy nexus. As the above section has stressed, it does so by simultaneously engaging both the material and the metaphorical dimension of disease as intra-acting forces in the event of the plague. The language of hands - as well as of mouths - shows H. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 248 Sina Schuhmaier F.’s ostensibly human perspective to be informed by material forces that have to be grasped in discursive terms and vice versa. “Fatal breath”: Speaking and breathing communicable disease As with hands, so with mouths: the mouth, in H. F.’s model of contagion, spreads or receives disease. Mouths convey a “fatal Breath” (63). John Hayward’s wife covers her mouth with a vinegar-soaked handkerchief to avoid infection, and H. F.’s friend Dr. Heath advises him to “hold in [his] Mouth” when going out (66). But the mouth also signals communication, and so acts of communication become risk encounters. People “openly conversing” with their neighbours run the risk of contracting the disease and hence further carrying it with them (118 f.). With a characteristic hint of classism and misogyny, H. F. (who wanders through town but stays solitary for the most part) notes that “the Plague is not to be avoided by those that converse promiscuously in a Town infected” (151). The plague is closely connected with social interactions (Dückmann Gallagher 2021: 145 f.). In turn, communication also becomes a way to understand the workings of a contagious disease. With its very first sentences, the Journal introduces the notion of contagious rumours. H. F. first hears about the plague returning in the Netherlands “in ordinary Discourse” and then tracks the passing on of information by “Word of Mouth”. The oral medium accounts for why “things did not spread instantly over the whole Nation”. Like a contagious disease in adverse environments, the rumour first “died off again” (Defoe 1992: 5). But when two men die of the plague in London, the family is unable to conceal their cause of death as the news “had gotten some Vent in the Discourse” (5). Here, “rhetoric itself operates by a model of contagion” and the medium of communication is both a “carrier of information as well as (potentially) plague itself ” (Boluk and Lenz 2010: 143 f.). (Mis)information spreads rapidly once it finds favourable hosts. Rumours, like and alongside pathogens, linger, spread, and go viral. Stories like those of murderous nurses travel and mutate (Defoe 1992: 71). As the disease spreads via the routes of trade, news of the London pandemic reach other ports and get blown up on the way: “the Report of these things lost nothing in the Carriage, the Plague it self was very terrible […]: But the Rumour was infinitely greater” (168). Rumours are “transmitters of the plague” and “themselves a kind of plague” (McDowell 2006: 100). The Journal relates several instances of false beliefs and superstitions that Londoners become susceptible to under the conditions of the pandemic. H. F. is quick to dismiss a rise in fortune-tellers and astrologers as based on irrational fears for which “there was no Remedy” (Defoe 1992: 27). He DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 249 10 Lay argues that in H. F.’s personal narration, the Journal creates a highly marketable form of subjectivity as an early “example for the systematic commercial exploitation of fictional subjectivity” (1999: 37). 11 On the text’s bias toward orality and its gendered basis, see McDowell. Women in the Journal tend to appear as a source of irrational beliefs and unreliable information. 12 On the therapeutic uses of H. F.’s storytelling, see Healy (2003: 39). makes it clear that this ‘disease’, like the thriving businesses of quack doctors, harms more than it heals (29 f.). In particular, H. F. shows their operations to be profit-driven above everything else. Instead of adhering to the Hippocratic oath, quack doctors behave like “every Shop-keeper with his Wares” (31). This analysis is offered in one of H. F.’s anecdotes by a woman who henceforth sets out to ruin the doctor’s reputation, giving him “ill Words” (31). ‘Ill words’ and bad-mouthed rumours circulate in a discursive and commercial economy. The mouth, of course, is also the organ of (inappropriate) consumption: H. F. refers to London’s poorest as starving, “useless Mouths” (156), and promiscuous communication equates with over-consumption. The plague itself, like the Great Fire of London, “consumes” (156), and bubonic swellings “digest” (70). The plague, in Defoe’s text, is a material-discursive occurrence, verbally manifesting itself in corporeal-and-figurative hands and mouths. The economy of plague communication, of course, is a sphere that H. F. partakes in - despite his biases against the wrong types of communication. 10 If the plague creates a “want of People conversing with one another” (131) and there is “no such Thing as Communication with one another, as before” (60), H. F. takes up the role of an archivist of stories, albeit in the safe medium of the written word. 11 The highly self-reflexive narrator, who continuously nods to his own digressions, redundancies, and very acts of storytelling, is ‘conversing’ plague information in the form of narratives. 12 Doing so, he is careful to authenticate his own stories as based on eye-witness observation or the direct relating of the story to him by trustworthy sources, “what I saw with my Eyes, and heard from other People that were Eye Witnesses” (83). H. F.’s empirical method of collecting verifiable stories, “which presented to the Eye, and the Ear; even in passing along the Streets” (99), directly involves his sensory perception of the city through the eye and ear. This variety of psychogeography (Löffler 2017: 190) translates the act of walking, as an activity that creates meaning through perception, into the act of writing. H. F.’s movements through the city - guided by senses, even if these stand in the service of an enlightenment epistemology - are coextensive with his writing. The materiality that is inscribed into H. F.’s text, of stories witnessed first-hand by the eye, passed from mouth-to-mouth, and handed on in written form, should not be neglected. H. F., in the typically DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 250 Sina Schuhmaier 13 Flynn, for example, reads the “speaking Sight” of the plague pit visited by H. F. as a prime example of interpretive uncertainty in the text (2005: 11 f.) didactic mode of his narration, reflects on the uses of his book for those “into whose Hands this may come” (63). It takes tangible hands for his writing to become ‘handy’ on a cognitive level, a handiness that then turns his stories ‘profitable’ for society (Defoe 1992: 52). The hand itself is also an instrument of writing. As this nexus of material-figurative hands and mouths shows, the plague can be seen as a material-discursive type of text that is written into the Journal and H. F.’s narration. ‘Stories of matter’: The 1665 plague as text Patients construct illness narratives, and diagnosis resembles close reading: Medicine, disease, and literary studies overlap in significant ways - something that has been recognised in the Medical Humanities. A number of studies of Defoe’s Journal have established the textuality of the plague in H. F.’s narrative (Boluk and Lenz: 2010; Cooke 2009; Flynn 2005). The 1665 plague is an event that invites hermeneutics, be it the divine, astrological, or empiricist interpretation of signs like the comets that were observed over the London sky prior to the pandemic (Defoe 1992: 20 f.). As H. F. is informed when he visits a plague pit, the plague is a “speaking Sight” - here calling for repentance - “and has a Voice with it”, possibly one, H. F. adds, that “no Tongue can express” (54). The disease is a practice in reading disorderly bodies (Flynn 2005), symptoms that are written onto bodies (Cooke 2009: 18 f.), polysemous ‘tokens’, and the city itself, with red crosses written on the doors of infected households and an altogether altered social organisation written by the plague (Löffler 2017: 205). Meaning has to be constructed anew from these signs (205), and because infection may precede knowledge of it, the plague also remains an indecipherable text. 13 As the ‘tokens’ that are regularly invoked by H. F. to denote bubonic swellings show, the plague text is one of interconnected corporeality, economic relations (tokens can be monetary; Boluk and Lenz 2010: 132; Dückmann Gallagher 2021: 151), and the sign system of language in general (a token is also a sign for something; Dückmann Gallagher 2021: 151). The plague ‘speaks’ with a ‘mouth’. The material metaphors that I have sketched so far not only make the plague legible; since the plague does not precede its textuality, they also co-constitute the plague as such in a web of signification that spans economy and communication. To study the form of Defoe’s text simply as a metaphorical extension of the plague experience where the diseased body becomes “material DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 251 for text” (Flynn 2005: 19) and the text “a body wherein symptoms of plague can also inscribe themselves” (Cooke 2009: 18) fails to give due account to the Journal’s attention to matter. But my reading is not a case of excavating the material alone: Rather, I argue that the ‘stories of matter’ that the Journal charts are neither purely material nor purely discursive. They make a case, in line with material ecocriticism, for considering “interrelations between discourse and matter” (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 2). To read the plague as text, then, means to tease out these interrelations rather than to position text in opposition to matter. The Journal shows the plague to be disseminated in close resemblance to processes of signification. The disease spreads exponentially from house to house, creating a chain of infection that soon becomes impossible to keep track of, just as it lends new meaning to signs: The first Person that dies of the Plague was in Decemb. 20 th , or thereabouts 1664s, […] and then one more was buried out of the same House: Then it was hush’d […] till the 22d of April, when there was 2 more not out of the same House, but out of the same Street […] and then it broke out in several Streets and spread every way. Now the Question seems to lye thus, where lay the Seeds of the Infection all this while? (Defoe 1992: 160) It is less H. F.’s question of origins and more the process of (uncertain) propagation itself that I want to foreground here. Anticipating germ theory, early modern physicians like Girolamo Fracastoro or Paracelsus thought of disease as a “determinate semina or seed” spread from body to body (Harris 2013: 16). H. F. picks up the idea and emphasises the unknowable component of infection, “for none knows when, or where, or how they may have received the Infection, or from whom” (Defoe 1992: 152). Jacques Derrida’s dissemination, according to which meanings are relative to play in the chain of signifiers, thinks about language in much the same terms. Contagious disease entails material and semiotic dissemination. Signification in H. F.’s narrative emerges from his own movements through the city and from “the Relation of others” (83). H. F. here means the relating of information; however, the lexeme also signals the material and semantic relations he enacts. The Journal as plague text shows H. F.’s narration to be co-written by a material-discursive nexus of cross-pollinating hands and mouths which signal beyond the boundaries of the human. The plague writes itself as a corporeally mediated text. The text can be reliable or not: The diseased body is no stable signifier, and diagnostic reading does not necessarily generate a stable meaning. It is only fitting, then, that the eeriness of invisible infection and of the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 252 Sina Schuhmaier 14 Derrida’s thought, in fact, was also influenced by the language of biology. His concept of ‘autoimmunity’, taken from the medical sphere where it denotes “a living organism […] protecting itself against its self-protection by destroying its own immune system”, extends to “a sort of general logic of autoimmunization” (Derrida 2002: 80) of, for instance, the political sphere. 15 Loar, drawing on Latour, proposes a similar conception (2019: 32 f.). plague-ridden city call for other Derridean concepts. Filled with ‘traces’ of a now-lost sociability, commerce, and life, Defoe’s ghost map of London has a distinct hauntological appeal. 14 As H. F.’s empiricist perception, according to which seeing is knowing, crumbles (Flynn 2005: 36), the human, as a rationally superior figure of logocentrism, recedes in this perspective. So does language as a strictly metaphysical category. Instead, the human-as-bodily-nature is embedded in material-discursive networks of distributed agency. Conclusion: Material-discursive assemblages As opposed to other forms of ‘inanimate matter’, the agency of contagious disease seems undeniable: After all, disease holds control over human life and death. Pandemics have significantly shaped the course of history and impact upon every facet of human life. And yet, accounts like these retain a conceptual divide between the human and the animate or inanimate matter of bacteria and viruses. At best, they acknowledge contagious disease as Frankenstein’s monster, created and exacerbated by human forces such as war, poverty, or expansion, but now terribly out of control. Through Defoe’s networked material metaphors, this paper has argued for a different model of what Bennett terms ‘distributive agency’ (2010: 21). 15 Thus, the plague in Defoe’s Journal can be seen to emerge as an “agentic assemblage” (21) composed of interactions between, among other things, the plague bacterium, human and more-than-human corpo‐ reality, urban infrastructure, and communication circuits. None of these agentic forces alone - neither the pathogen, nor the human - determines the pandemic. With transcorporeal processes, any idea of straightforward intentionality is obsolete, as Alaimo stresses (2010: 2). What “was once the ostensibly bounded human subject” is now a “material self ” which “cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial” (20). Beyond this entanglement of the human, my reading of Defoe’s text has attempted to point out that material agency is prescribed by discursive forces (Iovino and Oppermann 2014: 4) which in turn are determined by material agency. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 253 The microbial perspective through which I have read Defoe’s Journal and which I argue to be implicit in it, then, does not so much introduce a more-than-human nature (or, perhaps, ‘human’ nature) to discussions of the text. Rather, it rethinks categories like the human and nature to make a case for human nature and for material discursivity. This is less about rendering the pandemic as an inscrutable ‘hyperobject’, as Timothy Morton has suggested in regard to Covid-19 (Yağcıoğlu 2024: 204), and more about showing the plague to be both-material-and-discursive, as emerging in various entanglements (even if these will not become visible/ legible). Some of these (textual) entanglements became apparent when government authorities started tracing routes of infec‐ tion in the recent Covid-pandemic, people began to cover their mouths and noses and to regularly disinfect their hands, commodity flows were impacted, communication technologies became indispensable, and conspiracy theories arose. This paper has probed the microbial perspective as a conceptual response to such pandemic assemblages. Defoe’s Journal does not suspend the human perspective, and yet, it does point away from anthropocentric realism and towards the ‘stories of matter’ that pen a pandemic. Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloo‐ mington, IN: Indiana University Press. Backscheider, Paula R. 1992. “Preface”. In: A Norton Critical Edition: A Journal of the Plague Year. Ed. Paula R. Backscheider. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, ix-xiii. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. BBC. 2020. “Coronavirus: ‘We are at war’ - Macron”. https: / / www.bbc.com/ news/ av/ 51 917380. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boluk, Stephanie/ Lenz, Wylie. 2010. “Infection, Media, and Capitalism: From Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies”. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10/ 2, 126-147. Cooke, Jennifer. 2009. Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Defoe, Daniel. 1992. A Journal of the Plague Year. 1722. Ed. Paula R. Backscheider. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Defoe, Daniel. 2002. Due Preparations for the Plague (1722) and Mere Nature Delineated (1726). Ed. Andrew Weat. London: Pickering & Chatto. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 254 Sina Schuhmaier Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ and the Limits of Reason Alone”. 1996. Trans. Gil Anidjar. In: Anidjar, Gil, ed. Acts of Religion. New York: Routledge, 40-101. Dückmann Gallagher, Noelle. 2021. “Metaphors of Infectious Disease in Eighteenth-Cen‐ tury Literature: Complex Comparatives in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)”. In: Lawlor, Clark/ Mangham, Andrew, eds. Literature and Medicine: The Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 144-160. Flynn, Carol Houlihan. 2005. The Body in Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ganguly, Debjani. 2024. “The Aesthetic of Global Realism: Scales, Models, Technology, Ecology”. In: Duhan, Alice/ Helgesson, Stefan/ Kullberg. Christina/ Tenngart, Paul, eds. Literature and the Works of Universality. Berlin: De Gruyter, 265-282. Harris, Jonathan Gil. 2013. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shake‐ speare’s England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Healy, Margaret. 2003. “Defoe’s Journal and the English Plague Writing Tradition”. Literature and Medicine 22/ 1, 25-44. Herbrechter, Stefan. 2018. “Microbes”. In: Turner, Lynn/ Sellbach, Undine, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 354-366. Hooke, Robert. 1665. Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London: Printed by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry. Hörisch, Jochen. 2021. Hände: Eine Kulturgeschichte. München: Carl Hanser Verlag. Iovino, Serenella/ Oppermann, Serpil. 2014. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter”. In: Iovino, Serenella/ Oppermann, Serpil, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1-17. Kennedy, Jonathan. 2023. Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History. London: Torva. Lay, Frank. 1999. “The Exploitation of Subjectivity: Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plage Year”. In: Langford, Rachel/ West, Russell, eds. Marginal Voices, Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 37-49. Loar, Christopher F. 2019. “Plague’s Ecologies: Daniel Defoe and the Epidemic Constitu‐ tion”. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 32/ 1, 31-53. Löffler, Catharina. 2017. Walking in the City: Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeog‐ raphy in Eighteenth-Century London. Wiesbaden: Metzler. McDowell, Paula. 2006. “Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modeling Media Shift in A Journal of the Plage Year”. PMLA 121/ 1, 87-106. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. 1962. Science and Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Great Seal Books. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 Material Metaphors in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) 255 Nixon, Kari. 2020. Kept from all Contagion: Germ Theory, Disease, and the Dilemma of Human Contact in Late-Nineteenth-Century Literature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Watt, Ian P. 1974. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto & Windus. Yağcıoğlu, Hülya. 2024. “Vitality of Nonhuman Entities: Plagues and Pandemics as Hyperobjects in Defoe, Camus, and Pamuk”. In: Alberro, Heather/ Atasoy, Emrah/ Cas‐ tle, Nora/ Firth, Rhiannon/ Scott, Conrad, eds. Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities. London: Routledge, 203- 214. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0012 256 Sina Schuhmaier The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography: Lines of Air in Smith, Wordsworth, and Coleridge Alexander Scherr Introduction: Towards a more-than-human historiography of the Romantic age When scholars of Romanticism evoke the ‘spirit of the age’, they usually refer to the historical consciousness that began to take shape in late eighteenth-century Europe. The established literary-historical assumption is that the Romantics developed a heightened sense of living in history due to the revolutionary climate that was nourished, among other influences, by the events of the French Revolution. In his introduction to the “Romantic Period” section of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, M. H. Abrams reaffirms this assumption: he links the spirit of the age to the “pervasive feeling that this was an age of new beginnings when, by discarding traditional procedures and outworn customs, everything was possible, and not only in the political and social realm but in intellectual and literary enterprises as well” (2000: 6). The spirit of the age could thus denote an atmosphere of political and intellectual eventfulness, but it could also refer to a cultural moment permeated by an air of uncertainty. According to Reinhard Koselleck’s influential work (2004 [1979]), the late eighteenth century saw a crisis of historicism, that is, a growing awareness that the present is but a transitional moment within a perpetual movement from a recent past which is already left behind towards a future which has already begun to cast its shadows. Due to this historical shift, in modernity the present is characterized by a “difficulty of apprehending one’s own time” (243). Drawing on Koselleck, Emily Rohrbach has argued that authors around 1800 aimed to articulate this dilemma. “Romantic-period writers understood their world to be shadowed by a dark futurity, even inhabited by it”, she suggests (2016: 1). While these writers sought to grasp their own historical moment in its relationship to an “unknown DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 1 On the etymology of these terms, see also Abrams (1957: 121). and unpredictable time, yet to come” (1), their literature also acknowledges the epistemological limitations of this endeavour. In Rohrbach’s Keats-inspired phrase, the European era we now call Romanticism is the period of “modernity’s mist”, testifying as it does to “the tension between an unpredictable future and the urgency to define the present from a future vantage” (27). Regardless of whether we understand the formation of historical conscious‐ ness around 1800 in the more utopian terms of the ‘spirit of the age’ or the more Gothic register of ‘modernity’s mist’, readers may have noticed that the above account of the historiography of the period is riddled with aerial and climatological vocabulary. (My own language has employed terms such as ‘revolutionary climate’, ‘atmosphere of political and intellectual eventfulness’, and ‘air of uncertainty’.) I call attention to this situation not only to highlight how readily we resort to climatological metaphors to describe the Romantic shift in historical consciousness, but also to point out that, in traditional historiogra‐ phies of this era, they are considered as just that: metaphors. The assumption that the real physical properties of air, or changes in the natural atmosphere, may matter in the analysis of the late eighteenth-century crisis of historicism would not have made much sense to Koselleck and his followers. Although the Latin term spiritus - just as its cognates in Greek (pneuma), Hebrew (ruach), Sanskrit (atman), and many other languages - denotes both mental and physical phenomena (‘air/ wind’ vs. ‘soul’), 1 we have grown accustomed to retranslating the physical into the mental, the natural into the cultural. A ‘more-than-human historiography’ of the Romantic age, as I endeavour to outline it in this contribution, is reluctant to conduct such retranslations too readily. Taking its cue from Karen Barad’s theory of “agential realism” (2007: 132-185), it calls attention to “intra-actions” between materiality and discursivity in Romantic communication around 1800, contending that many writers of the period understood the changes of air which marked their historical moment in both material and discursive terms. In this context, the aerial quality of poetry - the idea that the language of poetry exhibits the same properties as those that Romantic science attributed to air - is particularly significant. To develop these connections in more detail, I engage with recent work in Romantic air and atmosphere studies, focusing especially on Thomas H. Ford’s theory of “atmospheric Romanticism” (2018: 17-53). By insisting that scholars of Romanticism must learn to ‘demetaphorize’ aerial communication around 1800 (200), Ford distinguishes his approach from Abrams’ pioneering analysis of nonhuman aerial actors in Romantic poetry (1957), in which breezes, winds, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 258 Alexander Scherr 2 Among the recent studies on Romanticism inspired by contemporary philosophies of the nonhuman are Morton (2008; 2012), Ellermann (2015), Gottlieb (2016), and Washington and McCarthy (2019). Directly relevant to my own argument is Michelle Speitz’s essay on “Affect and Air: The Speculative Spirit of the Age” (2019), though Speitz is less interested in historical consciousness. 3 The question when the Little Ice Age began is a controversial matter in which I cannot claim any geological expertise. It is safe to say, though, that it was well underway in the seventeenth century and entered its final phase at the end of the eighteenth century. Tobias Menely’s Climate and the Making of Worlds (2021) is the first study to conceptualize the Little Ice Age as a frame of reference for the interpretation of seventeenthto nineteenth-century English literature. clouds, and air are considered only as figures of speech. While Ford primarily locates his work in historicist and cultural-materialist traditions, I recognize in his framework an effort to link the epistemological concerns with the period’s sense of uncertainty to ontological assumptions about the properties of air and atmospheres. In this way, atmospheric Romanticism resonates with the return to ontology in recent philosophies of the nonhuman (from new materialism to speculative realism and object-oriented ontology), which has increasingly acknowledged Romantic thought as a key interlocutor for its own philosophical positions. 2 The re-evaluation of nonhuman aerial actors in Romantic air and atmosphere studies has implications for the work of historiography - a discipline that has paid increased attention to the nonhuman in the wake of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential work. In traditional historiographies of the Romantic age, the events which are conventionally considered crucial to the spirit of the age are those of “human history”, not “natural history” - to employ Chakrabarty’s distinction (2009: 201). A selection of the events of Romantic human history is included in Table 1. Grossly reductive as this list may be, we are likely to come across these events in standard introductions to English Romanticism (see, for example, Abrams 2000; Seeber 2012). In these established accounts, the events of natural history are usually not regarded as integral to the spirit of the age. For a long time, it mattered little to historians that the period around 1800 coincided with the final phase of the so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ - a geological period whose dimensions exceed the more modest historical units of literary and cultural periodisation. 3 In fact, to say that the events of human and natural history in Table 1 ‘coincide’ is to imply that they are not causally linked and could not meaningfully be integrated within one and the same calendar. From this traditional vantage point, the fact that the time around 1800 marks “the onset of carboniferous industrialization” (Ford 2017: 78) and can therefore be considered as one of the beginnings of the period we now call the Anthropocene is another DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 259 4 I include Watt’s invention of the steam engine under natural history because it has become symbolic of the dawning of industrialisation and industrial pollution. For the problem of how to periodize the Anthropocene and its many potential beginnings, see James (2022: 1-5). 5 For literary studies and literary history, see Bristow and Ford (2016), Horn (2016), and Menely and Taylor (2017). merely chronological overlap with the calendar of human history - nothing more. 4 Framework “human history” “natural history” Period Romanticism (c. 1785-1830) - Little Ice Age (c. 1600-1850) Key events (selection) 1789 French Revolution 1798 Lyrical Ballads 1807 Slave Trade Act (Britain) 1818 Frankenstein 1824 death of Byron 1770 renewed cooling 1774 steam engine ( J. Watt) 1783 Laki eruption 1815 Tambora eruption 1816 “Year without a Summer” Tab. 1: Historiographies of the period “circa 1800” Meanwhile, the problem with the Anthropocene is that it is not a purely geolog‐ ical period but a reckoning with epistemological, ethical, and historiographical implications. This, at least, is one of Chakrabarty’s key ideas. In “The Climate of History”, he posits that “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (2009: 201). For Chakrabarty, the challenge for historiography in the Anthropocene is to hybridize or “collapse” the calendars of the human and the natural in ways that enable innovative approaches for relating history to the vast dimensions of geological time. How this can be done is a methodological concern that scholars have only recently begun to discuss. 5 My contribution aims to advance this project. In correspondence with efforts to rethink the period around 1800 along “eco-historicist” lines (Higgins 2017: 12), it develops a more-than-human account of the Romantics’ sense of historical time, highlighting close entanglements between cultural and natural climates, human and nonhuman actors, and literary and scientific cultures. Focusing on the role of aerial nonhuman actors such as winds, clouds, and breezes, I offer readings of poems written around 1800 which embody not only the spirit of their more immediate historical surroundings but also, on a larger geological scale, the air of the Anthropocene. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 260 Alexander Scherr To elaborate this approach, I argue that Romanticism resonates particularly strongly with the challenges of the Anthropocene because it developed what Ford aptly calls an “atmospheric sense of history” (2018: 2). I begin by sur‐ veying recent work on Romantic atmospheres, which accounts for the late eighteenth-century fascination with atmospheres by interpreting the latter as ontological realms of uncertainty in which the boundaries between language and matter, human and nonhuman agency, history and nature, and literature and science are permeable rather than solid. 6 I suggest that an acknowledgement of these uncertainties can enrich the established historiographical assumption that the period’s sense of contingency stemmed from its increased historical consciousness. From the vantage point of atmospheric Romanticism, the spirit of the age involves “an experience of the air itself ” (Menely 2021: 170), even though this experience is articulated in an ever so elusive and cloudy language. In my close readings, I examine the aerial poetics of two texts - Charlotte Smith’s sonnet “LXXVII: To the insect of the gossamer” (1797) and William Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798) - which present themselves as lyrical lines of air that blend in with the uncertain climate of their time. I comment on the implications of my readings for a more-than-human historiography in a brief coda, closing my argument with a brief comparative glance at Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798). 7 Uncertain times, cloudy boundaries: A brief introduction to atmospheric romanticism “The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose”, writes Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (2003 [1790]: 7). The sentence is a rather obvious comment on the recent revolutionary events on the Continent, which the conservative Burke noted with some suspicion (in contrast to many other Romantic writers). Yet, Burke’s language also gestures towards a revolution of a different kind: the experiments which many of his contemporaries in both England and France had recently begun to carry out in the new sciences of air. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 261 6 In addition to Ford’s work (2017; 2018), which is particularly important for my own argument, my stance on Romantic atmospheres is indebted to Horn (2016), Higgins (2017), Fulford (2018), Nersessian (2020), Menely (2021), and Berns (2023). For a helpful overview of the emerging interdisciplinary field of air and atmosphere studies with a strong focus on the Romantic age, see Boyson (2022). 7 I will use in-text references for the three poems, citing by lines. References are to the following textual editions: Smith (1993 [1797]), Wordsworth (2013a [1798]), and Coleridge (2013 [1798]). 8 Romantic science was, for a long time, an entirely overlooked area of research - a neglect that was encouraged by the erroneous assumption that Romanticism was anti-science. Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2009) has done much to correct this image. Scholarship on Romantic air and atmospheres honours this reorientation. By the end of the century, there was a well-established experimental tradition in pneumatic chemistry, which had received considerable impulses from Joseph Priestley’s Experiments and Observations of Different Kinds of Air (1790 [1774- 1786]). There was also a more recent research area with strong interests in air: the emerging field of meteorology, which, according to Vladimir Janković (2000), became a modern scientific discipline around 1800. In one of his notebook entries written in 1796, Coleridge perceived contemporary society as standing on the threshold of a new age, expressly linking his hopes for the new century to “progression in natural philosophy - particularly, meteorology or science of airs & winds” (1957 [1796]: 133). Soon after, Luke Howard published his essay “On the Modifications of Clouds” (1865 [1803]), in which the vocabulary for the description of clouds (as it is still in use today) was established. As these examples underline, late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century thought was enamoured with air and atmospheres. It is vital for my argument that we keep in mind that the boundaries between the different experimental endeavours that participated in the Romantic spirit of the age were not as strict as we are tempted to consider them from the vantage of the twenty-first century. Ironically enough, the new sciences of air emerged in an uncertain cultural atmosphere in which meteorology and chemistry were not yet the specialized disciplines - separated by distinct theoretical assumptions, research methodologies, institutionalized protocols, and the like - as which we know them today (see also Fulford 2018: 113). This also goes for the discipline of climatology, which was envisioned by Romantic thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder to include both natural and human agency, and which was therefore as much an anthropological as it was a scientific endeavour (Horn 2016; Ford 2018: 10). Taking the fundamental cloudiness of such boundaries into account, recent scholarship on Romanticism proposes that, if we want to get to grips with the spirit of the age, we must enrich the study of the canonical texts of human history - including literature - with the study of contemporary scientific culture in order to bring the material-discursive qualities of Romantic air and atmospheres into view. 8 If we take this project seriously, we will see that the very distinction between literature and science constituted another cloudy boundary around 1800. As Ford points out, “[t]here were long-standing, multifaceted intersections DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 262 Alexander Scherr between experimental Romantic poetry and the emergent sciences of air” (2018: 150). An example is the highly experimental spirit that infused late eighteenth-century intellectual culture in Bristol. To traditional Romanticists, Bristol will likely suggest the place in which the first edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads - a key text of English Romanticism - was completed for publication in 1798 (hence, the entry in Table 1 above). Yet, it was also the place where, roughly around the same time, the Pneumatic Institution opened its doors. Established by the physician Thomas Beddoes in 1799, this medical institution accommodated the eccentric research of the chemist Humphry Davy (who also wrote poetry) and welcomed some of the best-known Romantic poets such as Robert Southey and Coleridge, who visited Beddoes and Davy to inhale nitrous oxide (O’Gorman 2011; Colman 2016; Fulford 2018). According to Ford, the manifold exchanges between scientifically interested poets and poetically-minded scientists testify to their shared concerns with “regulating patterns of respiration” (2018: 151) - a problem that required pneumatic chemists like Davy to experiment with the right dose of gas, and that led to similar experiments with metre (the lyrical patterning of respiration) in the literature of Wordsworth and other Romantic writers. What was at stake in these scientific-literary experiments, then, was real air. Both Romantic pneumatics and poetry aimed to put the human mind into “a state of vivid sensation”, as Wordsworth writes in his famous “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads (2013b [1800]: 95), by using air and metre as resources for intellectual elevation. If the Romantics aimed at something like “spiritual transcendence”, as has often been suggested, theirs was a model of transcendence “rooted in the material world” (Fulford 2018: 113). By insisting on this materialistic qualification, recent work on Romantic atmospheres challenges the thesis - famously put forward in Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1983) - that authors like Wordsworth and Coleridge celebrated nature as a model for art because it represented the sole promise of transhistorical permanence in a fast-changing world. For scholars such as Ford and Fulford, on the other hand, the Romantics were much closer to the breath of their historical moment - a breath they considered as at once natural and historical - than some scholarship in the traditions of cultural materialism and new historicism has been willing to admit. Atmospheric Romanticism thus paints the picture of a turn-of-the-century intellectual culture that was as much interested in air as it sought to be transformed by air. None of this is to say that Romanticism embraced a naïve kind of materialism. What is valuable about recent scholarship on Romantic atmospheres is that it registers a doubleness in the period’s sense of uncertainty, suggesting that DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 263 9 Such anxieties about the fleetingness of language can extend from oral communication to the medium of print. As Ford demonstrates in a reading of one of Wordsworth’s “Slate-Pencil” poems, they were nourished by the expansion of print capitalism, which multiplied texts to such an extent that poems like Wordsworth’s display a need to acknowledge their own marginal place in this new attention economy (2018: 79-94). the Romantics were not only uncertain about their historical moment but also about the philosophical means of apprehending it. The ontology of the atmosphere responds to this situation. As Ford explains, “Romantic uses of the word ‘atmosphere’ were often neither metaphoric nor literally physical, but instead pointed to a zone of indistinction, or of as yet unsettled knowledge, somewhere between literality and figuration, between scientific concepts and poetic evocation” (2018: 4). As a “zone of indistinction”, the ontology of air and atmospheres became a key framework through which many Romantic intellectuals related to the world they inhabited. They believed that air was of the natural world while also being indispensable to embodied human thinking about that world. In atmospheric Romanticism, poetry is the medium best-suited to embodied thinking, because its materiality is entirely on par with its textual or discursive features. Poetry was considered by many Romantic writers as an “aeriform” medium designed for recitation (Fulford 2018), sometimes featuring a blank verse whose endless enjambments may literally leave the reader breathless (Ford 2018: 164-173). But, like air, this poetry is often not solid or confident about its message, flaunting an anxiety that it might dissolve into the atmosphere without being noticed. 9 In Anahid Nersessian’s felicitous terminology, Romanticism articulates a sense of calamity about the effects of the Industrial Revolution but does so in a language that is “calamitous” in itself (2020: 4). While English poetry around 1800 responds to what Dorothy Wordsworth called “the alteration in the times” (2002 [1800]: 3), it considers itself as being affected by similar “qualities of indeterminacy, modifiability, vagueness, suspension and internal heterogeneity” (Ford 2018: 204). I will continue to delineate this precarious aerial ontology with the help of two poems which present themselves as modest “lines”, rendering their own lyrical work as a form of air writing. In choosing two texts which were both written in the experimental-revolutionary climate of the late 1790s, I aim to cast some new light on established literary-historical work on the period around 1800. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 264 Alexander Scherr 10 The spider is gendered as male in lines 12-13 (“…while sevenfold wreaths / of rain‐ bow-light around his head revolve”). “in mid air”: Aerial ontology in Charlotte Smith’s sonnet “LXXVII: To the insect of the gossamer” (1797) One way of summarising Charlotte Smith’s poem “To the insect of the gossamer” - a work that featured in the 1797 second volume of her Elegiac Sonnets - is to say that it is all about fine lines. In fact, the poem accords a double meaning to the concept of the ‘line’. Firstly, it refers to “the line / of Gossamer” (ll. 1-2), that is, the thin thread which some spiders (“insects”) employ for the purpose of floating through the air, embarking upon a journey which looks like a “fairy sail” (l. 8). In keeping with the Petrarchan tradition of the sonnet form, the poem’s speaker is full of admiration for its addressee, calling him a “viewless Æronaut” (l. 1) and praising the “form minute” (l. 5) of his material. 10 The spider’s flight might be short, but it is nevertheless celebrated as a heroic attempt to leave behind “Life’s dull realities” (l. 12). The line of the spider’s gossamer thus responds to an atmospheric ontology: The animal is envied for the sublime experience of floating “in mid air” (l. 2) and his ability to make contact with the gaseous environment by which contemporary poets and scientists alike were so fascinated. This contact is established through a near-invisible tool which is ambiguous in itself. Although the silken line of the gossamer is material, it is also characterized as “the golden thread that Fancy weaves” (l. 9), and hence a creative and even spiritual accomplishment, a work of art. This choice of language already gestures towards the second meaning of the term. The “line” is also the instrument of poets, which includes - in a highly self-referential manner - Smith’s own poetic line. As Bethan Roberts observes, the sonnet repeatedly indicates a “correlation between poet and spider” (2019: 149), most explicitly in line 11, in which the spider is called a “young and visionary Poet”. For Ford, the most outspoken proponent of atmospheric Romanticism, “correlation” would probably not be strong enough a term, though. To recall, his framework assumes that Romantic poems which address aerial phenomena usually indicate that they are made of the same aeriform material. From this point of view, the text is literally an “aerographic sonnet” (Speitz 2019: 48). Indeed, the enjambments in the poem produce the effect that it stands “in mid air” itself, and one could argue further that the text floats between the Italian and English traditions of the sonnet, having its initial Italian quatrain (ABBA) followed by an English quatrain (ABAB) and a sestet comprised of three couplets (Roberts 2019: 148). Because of its internal dynamics of change and alteration, the poem gives a general impression of windiness, DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 265 remaining faithful to its aerial poetics until the end. Consequently, when in line 14 the speaker conjectures that the spider’s aerial journey will soon be over (“Ah! soon at Sorrow’s touch the radiant dreams dissolve! ”), the sonnet ends as well, literally dissolving into air. From a more-than-human perspective that takes the intimate connections between discursivity and materiality seriously, it is conspicuous how frequently Smith’s sonnet LXXVII foregrounds constraints to its poet-protagonist’s actions, figuring agency as a phenomenon residing in what Barad calls “intra-action” (2007: 33) rather than discrete individuals. As is pointed out in line 4, the voyage of the sonnet’s nonhuman protagonist is “breeze-guided” (in much the same way in which the poetic line is breath-guided), meaning that the spider is not a fully autonomous actor and cannot navigate the environment as he pleases. This philosophy provides a twist to Romantic efforts at transcendence, which the poem genders as male, thus producing an effect of irony and critical distancing on the part of the female poet. Its speaker professes awareness that, at the very moment that the spider is about to abandon “Life’s dull realities”, his flight will soon be terminated by “the keen Swift” (l. 8). Roberts is therefore right to observe that “this flight or transcendence is temporary and limited, dependent on external forces that also bring about its end” (2019: 149). It is almost as if the strong currents of history would cast the spider-poet back into the vortex of his historical moment, forcefully reminding him that he is not in control of the unsteady atmosphere of his time. In this context, the fact that the poem’s nonhuman Æronaut is “viewless” (l. 1) underlines his lack of vision concerning the course of future events. In her reading of the sonnet, Roberts points out that the term “Æronaut” had only recently emerged in European languages in connection with the invention of the hot-air balloon (2019: 150) - another French revolutionary success of the 1780s. The notion is also found in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which Burke advises his compatriots to stand “on the firm ground of the British constitution” while cautioning them against the “attempt to follow in their desperate flights, the aëronauts of France” (2003 [1790]: 210). Recent human history is here conflated if not with natural history, then at least with technological history and attendant hopes of mastering the natural world (which, from today’s point of view, are impossible to dissociate from the Anthropocene). For the conservative Burke, this spirit is a little too adventurous. His language betrays an anxiety of too much revolution, an awareness of a climate so windy that it can hardly be navigated. With too much experimenting going on (both in the political and the scientific realm), the “firm ground” of established knowledge is abandoned and the sense of uncertainty increases. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 266 Alexander Scherr 11 Wordsworth’s oeuvre comprises several other poems stylized as “lines”. Among the examples published in the Lyrical Ballads are “Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree which stands near the Lake of Esthwaite”, “Lines written at a small distance from my House, and sent by my little Boy, to the Person to whom they are addressed”, and “Lines written in early spring”. 12 Marjorie Levinson points out that this date is not only the day before the ninth anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille but also the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat (1986: 16). Smith’s sonnet, I want to suggest, expresses concerns with the difficult job of poetry in such an uncertain climate. It does not so much critique the spirit of the age than inquire into the implications of this historical shift for a language which is itself perceived as aeriform, modifiable, and indeterminate. Staging the effort of (male) Romantic poetry to transcend its circumstances and create permanence, the sonnet ends in dissolution, admitting to a poetic line which is just as fine and fragile as the spider’s thread. “wreaths of smoke”: The weak historicity of William Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798) To refine my understanding of the Romantic poetics of lines as a precarious and fragile treatment of a given topic, I turn to a second textual example which evokes this epistemological stance as early as its title: William Wordsworth’s “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798”. 11 Perhaps it would be appropriate to think of my own reading as lines written on “Tintern Abbey”, as reasons of space will require me to bracket a number of points raised in previous analyses of this highly canonical poem. These include, for instance, the text’s political context, which is already evoked by the inclusion of the date of Wordsworth’s visit to the Wye Valley in the poem’s title - a trip he undertook on July 13, 1798, together with his sister Dorothy. 12 When Wordsworth refers to “the fretful stir / Unprofitable” and “the fever of the world” in his poem (ll. 53-54), it is hard not to think of the revolutionary political climate of the 1790s, though it has also been suggested that more personal events - from family problems to financial worries - had taken their toll on the poet (Levinson 1986: 18). Given my interest in Romantic air and atmospheres, I feel even more remiss in having to gloss over some of the insightful readings of the poem’s form presented by other scholars. Ford and Fulford, in particular, have done much to analyse Wordsworth’s “pneumatic” employment of the blank verse by relating his literary experiment to the research at Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institution - a DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 267 13 William and Dorothy visited the Wye Valley during their summer stay in Bristol. Ford conjectures that Wordsworth may have met Beddoes during this time (2018: 186). The characterisation of “Tintern Abbey” as a poem showcasing “Wordsworth’s great pneumatic blank verse” is also Ford’s (188). collaboration which Ford retraces with great attention to detail. 13 Among the key passages examined by these scholars is the final part of the poem’s second stanza, where Wordsworth describes the mood in which the human mind is at its most receptive, ideally suited for the composition of poetry: […] that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul. (ll. 42-47) Fulford does an excellent job of arguing that these lines paint a physiological picture of human consciousness, which goes to relativize McGann’s critique that Romantic poets renounced their material reality, celebrating the immaterial (2018: 101-102). For Fulford, the whole poem is a meditative exercise in respiration, readable as Wordsworth’s attempt to find peace of mind in troubling times, but not a naïve idealisation of sublime nature. The critique of the poem’s lack of awareness of its material circumstances has often targeted a passage which is relevant to my own historiographical concerns. It appears at the end of the first stanza, in which Wordsworth first describes his enthused impressions of the natural landscape upon his return to the Wye Valley, reflecting on the five years which have passed since his last visit: […] Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone. (ll. 15-23) Much vigorous debate has ensued over the “wreathes of smoke”, which the poem seems to render as a natural part of an idyllic landscape. In her widely received DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 268 Alexander Scherr essay on “Insight and Oversight: Reading ‘Tintern Abbey’” (1986), Majorie Levinson subjects the above-quoted lines to a suspicious reading, emphasising that Wordsworth’s presentation of the smoke occludes the social reality of his time: “In 1798”, she clarifies, “the Wye Valley, though still affording prospects of great natural beauty, presented less delightful scenes as well. The region showed prominent signs of industrial and commercial activity: coal mines, transport barges noisily plying the river, miners’ hovels” (29). Levinson also demystifies the “vagrant dwellers” to whom the speaker alludes in line 21, arguing that these people would in reality likely have been charcoal burners who depended on extremely precarious work for their livelihood (29). From the vantage point of a critical reading in the tradition of Levinson and McGann, Wordsworth is quickly accused of romanticising the landscape in a way that clouds the judgment of social reality and is inattentive to the historical context. “Most of the poems we call Romantic resist historical elucidation”, Levinson states in more general terms (55). Recent work on Romantic atmospheres does not so much disagree with this statement than entertain the possibility that cloudiness - the incapacity of “historical elucidation” at a time when real changes to the world’s atmosphere were becoming palpable - is a part of Romantic historical consciousness itself, a way in which writers around 1800 sought to apprehend a changing world while acknowledging the limitations of their efforts. Here, I return to the poetics of Romantic lines. In a particularly forceful reading of the poem, Ford calls attention to the “little lines” in line 16, interpreting them in a similarly self-referential way as I read the “line of Gossamer” in Smith’s sonnet: “Lines of this nature - involuted, self-referential lines that name themselves as ‘lines’ - are in Wordsworth very often lines of vapour or lines of curling mist: that is to say, atmospheric lines”, Ford submits (2018: 156). Although the “little lines / Of sportive wood” are not clearly marked as aerial themselves, Ford reads them as part of an atmospheric environment that, while strongly affecting the speaker, always remains obscure. His suggestion is that “Tintern Abbey” depicts a “landscape [which] has been so abstracted that it has converged with the poem itself ” (156) - an aerial surrounding that blends in with a poetic language composed of similarly aerial lines. There is thus a general atmosphere of uncertainty in the text, which turns the whole poem into “a scenery of vapour” (15). This is exactly the impression on which Keats reports in a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds, written on May 3, 1818. In it, Keats praises “Tintern Abbey” for articulating the contemporary sense of uncertainty - the impression that recent historical events and advances in scientific knowledge about air have paradoxically resulted in an atmosphere of ever more indeterminacy. With DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 269 14 Rohrbach’s notion of “modernity’s mist” takes its inspiration from this passage. “Tintern Abbey”, Keats writes, “We are in a mist - We are now in that state - We feel the ‘burden of the Mystery’” (2000 [1818]: 893). 14 The context just outlined is helpful for reconsidering the “wreathes of smoke” as another vaporous appearance in the sky above Tintern Abbey. It is true that Wordsworth does not retrace their origin to the industries that had become part of the Wye Valley by the end of the eighteenth century, which is why - from today’s historical perspective and with the knowledge we possess about the Anthropocene - it is tempting to read this absence as an “oversight” in Levinson’s sense. However, in presenting his observations as “lines”, Wordsworth also makes no claim to assessing the harm (let alone the harmful long-term effects) of the smoke on the Earth’s atmosphere. Instead of blindly transcending its social context, his poem perceives its historical moment as cloudy, meaning that it articulates concerns about the fleetingness of the speaker’s momentary vision. Wordsworth aims to shield his language from the threat of evaporation in the poem’s final stanza by addressing Dorothy as a sympathetic listener and installing her as a future rememberer of the current moment of joy. Still, what Nersessian writes about Wordsworth in a different context is also true of “Tintern Abbey”: being aware of its own transience, his poetry attests to a “problem of recognizing or registering historical causality” even as it acknowledges this effort as the order of the day (2020: 61). Following scholars such as Nersessian, Ford, and Rohrbach, I propose that we may think of this difficulty as a weak form of historicity rather than blank a-historicity coded as transcendence. This proposal has implications for the way in which we understand the role of Romantic poetry in its contradictory relation to the emerging historical sense of change and transitionality. Much traditional scholarship solves this contradiction by assuming that Romantic writers looked to nature as “the transhistorical opposite to the fissile antagonisms of historical experience” (Ford 2018: 151), using nature as a model for their poetry as an art of transcendence. Atmospheric Romanticism complicates this assumption insofar as it reads Romantic conceptions of nature as more contradictory in themselves. Writers around 1800 may have desired permanence in the forms of nature and art, but their experiments with air and atmospheres - together with the contemporary scientific knowledge established about these phenomena - advanced their sense of mutability, vagueness, and uncertainty. The poetic “lines” of these writers were seen as capable of reshaping the atmospheres by which they were simultaneously informed. Yet, they were also troubled by an DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 270 Alexander Scherr anxiety of misrecognising their historical circumstances, and of dissolving into the atmosphere without being noticed. Coda: Historiography “in a mist” The notion of weak historicity allows me to restate my hypothesis that the sense of temporal uncertainty which emerged in European modernity towards the end of the eighteenth century was accompanied by additional uncertainty about the philosophical means of apprehending it. What is cloudy in atmospheric Romanticism is not only “the alteration in the times” (see section 2) but also the boundaries between the discursive and the material, the human and the nonhuman, history/ culture and nature, literature and science. In exploring these constellations, recent scholarship on Romantic air and atmospheres takes a page from both innovative historicist work (Ford, Nersessian, Rohrbach, Menely) and approaches inflected by philosophies of the nonhuman (Morton, Gottlieb, Speitz). While my own contribution has aimed to enrich this vibrant field by offering readings of two Romantic poems that present themselves as transitory “lines”, other forms have come under scrutiny in recent scholarship. Ute Berns (2023), for example, discovers an aerial poetics of a different kind in S. T. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (1798), the opening poem in the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Although the text is written in archaic language and indebted to genre traditions that foreground the supernatural (Gothic literature, apocalyptic Biblical narrative), Berns demonstrates that it responds to the transitional climate of its own historical context in surprising ways. The relevant context, however, is not the revolutionary political climate but an atmospheric change of a more literal kind: the transition in energy politics and the shift towards fossil fuels which would soon lead to the appearance of steam-powered ships on the oceans while also exacerbating aerial pollution. Taking this shift seriously, Berns makes much of the sudden emergence of the ghost ship in the ballad’s third part - the event that follows the Marinere’s careless shooting of the albatross. She observes that the two spectral figures which command the strange vessel are described as “Jet-black” (l. 183) - a reference to coal - while their ship is not dependent on the wind (ll. 161-162: “Withouten wind, withouten tide, / She steddies with upright keel”). Historical precision is crucial: In 1798, when the ballad was first published, no steamships had travelled the oceans yet, but their appearance was palpable for contemporaries and quite literally in the air. For Berns, this structure of feeling is articulated by the ballad. She suggests that Coleridge’s Marinere is “Ancyent” DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 271 because his ship is still reliant upon the wind for movement - an idea which is supported by the “unpredictable stop-and-go dynamic” in which the stanzas are composed (Berns 2023: 234). By contrast, the ghost ship is ‘modern’ because it introduces a turning point to established energy cultures, ushering in the geological transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. Although she does not frame it in these terms, Berns presents us with a highly innovative reading of the Romantic spirit of the age in which, however, this spirit already anticipates its pollution by the “soot” of the Anthropocene. This is precisely the Marinere’s perception of the atmosphere briefly before the arrival of the modern ship: “We could speak no more than if / We had been choked with soot” (ll. 133-134). I conclude with Coleridge’s “Rime” (as mediated through Berns’ reading) to suggest that literary historiography in the Anthropocene is a cloudy and even sooty project itself. What I have conceptualized as a more-than-human histor‐ iography seeks to challenge the clear-cut boundaries between “human history” and “natural history” (in Chakrabarty’s sense), venturing into a hazy zone of indeterminacy. For the Romantic age, it enriches the traditional humanistic scale of analysis, such as the ‘spirit of the age’ or Koselleck’s notion of Sattelzeit (the formation of historical consciousness in the period from c. 1750 to 1850), with the scales of natural history (the Great Transition, the Little Ice Age, etc.), refusing to dismiss this overlap as mere coincidence. The historiography I envision registers some confusion about what drives history and historical consciousness in the period around 1800: the French Rev‐ olution or the onset of industrial pollution? Experimental poetry or pneumatic science? An immaterial spirit or palpable changes in the real air? To see that the lines between these alternatives are rarely solid is one way of understanding the Romantics’ fascination with aerial-poetic “lines”, and thus of historicising their own feeble sense of history. As Eva Horn has pointed out (2016: 88), the period around 1800 is so relevant to the historiography of the Anthropocene not simply because it happens to be the time when the steam engine was invented, or when the Industrial Revolution took place (historical facts readily cited by scientists today). It was also the period when Romantic writers first developed a vague awareness of the problem of thinking the Anthropocene avant la lettre (historical consciousness). In view of our own climate uncertainty, which has prompted some sociologists to posit that we are experiencing a renewed crisis of historicity and are on our way into “a different modernity” (Blühdorn 2024), this is a consciousness that literary historians may have to reappreciate. Hybridising human and natural history in innovative ways, we, too, must rise to the task of thinking “in a mist”. DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 272 Alexander Scherr Works cited Abrams, M. H. 2000. “Introduction: The Romantic Period, 1785-1830”. In: Abrams, M. H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7 th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1-21. Abrams, M. H. 1957. “The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor”. The Kenyon Review 19/ 1, 113-130. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berns, Ute. 2023. “Coleridge’s Ecologies and Energy Poetics: The Case of Lyrical Ballads”. 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DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0013 The Romantic Spirit of the Age from the Perspective of a More-Than-Human Historiography 275 1 Now published under the name Wren James. 2 Rosi Braidotti defines zoe as “the nonhuman, vital force of Life” describing it as “the transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains” (2016: 22). Rhizomic Minds: Transversal Perspective in Lauren James 1 ’s Green Rising Sarah Wegener Introduction Do plants have a perspective of their own? Climate fiction, especially for children or young adults, has nowadays developed into a prolific genre to “explore any imaginative planty perspectives and associated agency” ( Jones and MacLeod 2014: 427). Offering possibilities for “botanical encounters” to young readers (427), cli-fi works can inspire reflection on the “placement, use and positioning of plants (and their products) within a narrative” (428). The term ‘perspective’ liberally understood as “an individual point of view” (“Perspective, N., Sense III.9.a.”) is commonly linked to ‘subjectivity’ as “[p]ertaining to the […] particular perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires” of one particular subject (Solomon 2005). Where cli-fi experiments with anthropomorphised perspectives of plants and other nonhuman entities (Bernaerts et al. 2014: 68 f.; Shang 2022: 61), other critical fields of inquiry, such as posthumanism, have begun to philosophically uproot subjective consciousness (Hayles 1999: 5; Braidotti 2016: 14; Huff 2017: 280). Over the past few decades, posthumanist criticism has ventured beyond the point where ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ exist as distinct categories. Rather, terms like “naturecultures”, “companion species” (Haraway 2003: 3 f.), “the zoe-centred subject” (Braidotti 2016: 26), 2 or “multispecies assemblages” (Carstens 2018: 345) bypass human exceptionalism for “relational ontologies” (Castree 2003: 203) that stress the multiple interactions between human and nonhuman matter to the point where distinguishing them becomes impracticable (Strengers and Maller 2018: 3). A concept crucial to such a philosophy of relations is Gilles Deleuze DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 3 “Transversality” is a central concept in posthumanist criticism and imparts an “uncoded, transgressive, and at times illicit mode of knowledge” (Braidotti 2019: 1190). The term is used to rethink “subject-formation” but also to stress heterogeneity of concepts, thoughts, and ideas within the posthumanist field (Braidotti 2019: 1184). and Félix Guattari’s “rhizome” (2013: 5). Derived from horizontally connected botanical root systems, rhizomes are “multiplicities” that have “neither subject nor object” but only “lines” and relational points of contact (7). Integral to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “becoming”, rhizomic principles replace the self-identified (human) subject with “transversal communications between heterogeneous populations” (279). 3 This has larger philosophical implications for post-anthropocentric representations of subjectivity. Drawing on Deleuzian philosophy, Rosi Braidotti argues that “[h]uman subjectivity in this complex field of forces has to be re-defined as an expanded relational self ” (2016: 22). Confirming the “destabilization of […] the self as an autonomous, individual subject” (Coyle 2006: 506), this infers that the way in which humans think and perceive the world is saturated with their nonhuman surroundings. Braidotti accordingly formulates the “zoe-centred subject” as a non-binary organism that she defines as “a transversal entity, fully immersed in and immanent to a network of nonhuman (animal, vegetable, viral, technological) relations” (2016: 26). From a posthumanist angle, what has commonly been termed a subjective viewpoint becomes a relational network. A recent literary text illustrative of “‘more-than-human’ thinking” (Strengers and Maller 2018: 3) is Lauren James’s Green Rising (2021). This young adult cli-fi novel involves teenagers who learn to sprout plants at will. Lending their bodies as a substratum to vegetal growth, they are physiologically affected by nonhuman organisms and their “strange hive mind” ( James 2021: 115) becomes attuned to the other-than-human willpower of plants. Recent scholarship has begun to address the posthumanist implications of this novel. Contributions by Jonas Vanhove and Simon De Backer (2025) as well as by Sam Haddow (2025) have taken special interest in James’s use of the “mycorrhizal network” to ap‐ proach the versatile and productive links between species and thus “decentralize the human and foreground human-nonhuman collectives and assemblages” (Vanhove and De Backer 2025: 7). Arguing that Green Rising “narrativize[s] the themes of contemporary plant studies”, Chloé Germaine, in turn, reads the novel against central conjectures from this field, like “vegetal subjectivity, interiority, and agency” (2023: 160, 163). While Germaine pointedly labels “plant-being and young people’s subjectivities as an entangled phenomenon” (164), a more detailed discussion of perspective in the novel is still wanting, especially one where posthumanist and narratological concerns intersect to introduce greater DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 278 Sarah Wegener transversality into perspective. To return to the beginning: What happens to the ‘individual point of view’ in systems built on multiplicity? Adding to the valuable insights mentioned above, I propose a rhizoanalytic approach to Green Rising. My essay combines Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and Braidotti’s notion of zoe as an affective, subject-decentring energy. Relying on relation and multiform points of contact between human and nonhuman, the hybridised viewpoint in James’s novel is driven by heterogeneity and expands on the transsubjective dimension of zoe. Drawing on Ansgar Nünning’s premise that “perspective is applicable not only to the rhetorical structure of narrative transmission, but, in a more literal manner, to the semantic content of narratives” (2001: 207), my contribution looks at perspective both as a representation and as a technique. Interestingly, James’s novel mostly deviates from more common narratological trends including “nonhuman entities [that] take on the roles of narrator, character, and focalizer in a narrative text, and thus, perform three functions, namely, the telling, acting, and observing functions” (Shang 2022: 59). Instead, I argue that perspective in Green Rising is rhizomic and expressed in affective points of contact between plants and their human hosts. While it sometimes falls into anthropocentric traps, the novel nonetheless experiments with alternative modes of expression beyond the mechanisms of thinking and telling on the subject level. I suggest that by drawing on rhizomic principles of growth and connection in areas such as cerebration and affect, the novel offers a dynamic approach to consciousness and its narrative expression. With varying degrees of success, this strategy tries to avoid a common problem of nonhuman narrative, namely a “projection of human experientiality” that collapses all efforts to represent other-than-human agents into a “didactic function” for humans (Bernaerts et al. 2014: 74, 70). As my discussion will show, perspective in Green Rising is represented as relational, affective, and dynamic: exemplifying the posthumanist notion of ‘becoming’, humans and plants think, perceive, and feel in relation. Rhizomic thought, symbiotic affect: Decentring perspective in multi-species networks Paving the way for the close reading of perspective as representation and device in the novel, it is helpful to theoretically unravel the three central terms used in the introduction - relation, affect, and dynamic modes of becoming - as pro‐ ductive philosophical approaches to reconfigure cognitive models and thereby recast subjectivity. Embracing relation in a posthumanist sense deconstructs hierarchies, especially such in which humans are commonly referred to as “be‐ DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 Rhizomic Minds: Transversal Perspective in Lauren James’s Green Rising 279 ings accorded the honour to be sentient” vis-à-vis an insentient ecology (Latimer and Miele 2013: 21 f.). This binary distinction ties hierarchy to cognition: While conscious thought elevates humans, its absence demotes nonhuman entities such as plants, inferring that “the vegetative state of being is an unthinking state of being” (Woodard 2018: 132). For posthumanism such hierarchies are notoriously problematic because they tend to ignore not only how human minds and bodies exist in mutual dependence with the ecological world but also that there might be forms of sentience outside of human(ist) epistemologies (131 ff.). Accepting a more “embedded and embodied” version of cognition (Braidotti 2016: 28), however, recognises that thought is influenced by multiple factors both inand exterior to the human body and brain (Pepperell 2003: 25). In light of what Robert Pepperell terms “a dynamic conception of thought” that “allows us to account for the widely dispersed factors that collectively generate conscious sensation”, posthumanist criticism has increasingly turned to more dynamic networks of relationality and exchange (2003: 25). In this context, the flexible and adaptable patterns of growth proper to plants have served as challenges to human superiority: “They are ‘dynamic’ in the sense that they are constantly changing, progressing, or ‘acting up’, often in ways that humans have minimal control over, understanding of, or input into” (Strengers and Maller 2018: 2). This undercuts and questions hierarchical relationships between humans and their vegetal surroundings (Woodard 2018: 132). Drawing on this botanical resistance to hierarchy and its propensity for dynamic interaction, Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s application of the term “rhizome” has fundamentally contributed to a philosophical “deterritorializa‐ tion” of thought (2013: 9). As introduced at the beginning of this essay, rhizomes are dispersed and intertwined webs of (underground) root connections: “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other” (Deleuze and Guattari 2013: 5). Therefore, if a rhizome is torn, “it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (8), hence multiplying its directions. What Deleuze and Guattari call “[t]he wisdom of the plants” is their rhizomic way of forming dynamic networks, also with non-plant matter like animals or humans (10). “[C]omposed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion” (22), the rhizome resists univocal patterns of interaction between organisms. Stressing the parallels between rhizomes and fungi mycelia, Joshua Finzi highlights that “[r]hizomic relationships are engagements of reciprocity, correspondences between spheres of influence without stringent directional parameters by which to be dominated and fixed” (2024: 10). Since fungi exist beside but distinct from other organisms like plants or animals, the mycelium functions as a potent ecological materialisation of rhizomic patterns (3, 12). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 280 Sarah Wegener Rhizomes hence encapsulate heterogeneity and multidirectional adaptation rather than vertical structure. Importantly, Deleuze and Guattari use this vegetal network pattern to encour‐ age substantial objections to conventional ideas of cognition. Used in philosophy and neuroscience alike, tree-metaphors for human cerebration affirm a central governing cerebral stem and “a bloom of synaptic connections” responsible for a wider canopy of thoughts (Brits 2018: 81, 83). Deleuze and Guattari, however, replace plant metaphors of thinking with fungal ones, centrally criticising that “arborescent systems are hierarchical systems” and are thus “forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centred or segmented higher unity” (2013: 16). “Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter”, they suggest (15). Instead, they find “discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures” much closer to rhizomes (15). Horizontal by design, these mycelian structures avoid vertical hierarchies. At the same time, the rhizomic patters of distribution and connection contest the existence of minds in isolation, confirming Kathy Schuh and Donald Cunningham’s suggestion that “the metaphor captures the notion of mind as a collection of minds rather than an individual mind” (2004: 337). A central premise of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s rhizome, whether in nature or in mind, is its evasion of binaries between subject and object: “It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object” (2013: 22). Since, to follow Finzi, “rhizomic networks [. . .] dismantle binary logics of the one-multiple, inside-outside, subject-object” (2024: 13), the mind as a rhizome offers multiple links with other minds, other species, and the environment in multidirectional and horizontal networks (Schuh and Cunningham 2004: 334; Stark 2015: 186). More-than-human cognition thus centrally depends, like the synapses in the brain, on the points where paths touch or connect. This, in turn, prompts reflections on affect, defined as the “ability to affect and be affected” (Massumi 2019: xv). Detangled from emotion, affect opens channels of mutual affectability between different species and their bodies within the collective (Deleuze and Guattari 2013: 280). Understood “in terms of ‘attachment’ on the one hand and being ‘moved’ on the other” (Latimer and Miele 2013: 7 f.), affect can hence be used to explain how humans and nonhumans exist in relations of continuous mutual impact because they are constantly touched, moved, or physically impacted by each other. Since this definition of affect accords greater importance to “a field of budding relation” than the individual within it (Massumi 2011: 39), the self or subject is displaced from a position of exceptionality. This DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 Rhizomic Minds: Transversal Perspective in Lauren James’s Green Rising 281 connects with Braidotti’s notion of zoe. Defined as “the endless vitality of life as a process of continuous becoming” (Braidotti 2008: 182), zoe builds on reciprocal affective exchange between embodied agents, both human and nonhuman. As Delphi Carstens explains, “zoe flourishes” by “expressing life’s power to affect or be affected, to enter into animated multispecies assemblages and uncanny admixtures of life/ non-life” (2018: 350). For Braidotti, “affectivity” is hence essential for “a more adequate understanding of the connections between the self and a multitude of other forces” (2008: 189). Acknowledging the affective force of zoe therefore “displaces the phallocentric vision of consciousness, which hinges on the sovereignty of the ‘I’” (184). Like the rhizome, affect can thus be a helpful approach to “reverse the exclusions brought about by the subject-object divide” (Latimer and Miele 2013: 19). If everything affects and is affected in ecological ontologies, dualist hierarchies between subjects and objects, i.e. human subjects vs. nonhuman objects, cease to matter (8, 21 f.). As noted above, the idea of becoming posits a dynamic, non-finite, and non-hierarchical way of describing co-action and mutual affect between hetero‐ geneous entities without succumbing to humanist ideas of subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari 2013: 278). Central in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and adopted by Braidotti (2008: 178) or Donna Haraway (2008: 4), among others, ‘becoming’ stresses ongoing relations “trespassing all metaphysical boundaries” (Braidotti 2008: 178). In this sense, the progressive verb relies on multiple, interconnected, and non-hierarchical nodes between species or entities, which returns us to the first of the concepts in this discussion: “Becoming is a rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 2013: 279). A more practical example to approach ‘becoming’ is ‘symbiosis’, a term which delineates the multiple affective relation of humans and nonhumans (278; Stark 2015: 186; Paraschiv 2022: 146; Clarke 2025: 419). As Haraway famously put it, the human body itself carries so many microscopic symbionts that being as we understand it must be reconfigured as “to become with many” (2008: 4; original emphasis; see also Paraschiv 2022: 146; Strengers and Maller 2018: 3). Therefore, the human subject never is or thinks in isolation. What can be derived from all this for the question of perspective? If there no longer is a clearly bound subject vis-à-vis an object, but only affective relation of becomings, this complicates who thinks, perceives, feels, and acts towards whom. Reconfigured as an amalgam that fuses the thinking self with its environment, “the posthuman’s collective heterogeneous quality implies a distributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with one another”, to draw on Katherine Hayles (1999: 3). As mentioned in the introduction, “a nomadic vision of the subject as embedded DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 282 Sarah Wegener and embodied, relational and affective” counters and replaces the “reductive definition of the human as coinciding with his cerebral and neural capacities” (Braidotti 2016: 28; 19; original emphasis). If the subject is no longer a hierarch‐ ical entity, but an “embodied and embrained immanence” (19), the idea of subjectivity is too restrictive. In this sense, “transversal subjectivities, composed in the mode of eco-sophical assemblages that include non-human actors, stress the grounded, situated, and perspectivist dimension of knowledge” (Braidotti 2019: 1187). Drawing on these insights and retracing the terms outlined in this section, my ensuing discussion of Lauren James’s Green Rising will explore how perspective ‘in becoming’ emerges from a rhizomic kind of cognition that builds on affective points of contact. “[D]esire to grow”: Rhizomic cognition Green Rising begins with a subject zero. Gabrielle is the first of the “greenfingers” and the “firstwithmagic” ( James 2021: 20, 33). She realises that she can grow plants from her bare hands in the midst of a climate protest as the strange vigour of a leaf unfurling from her fingertip catches her unaware. Realising that “it was trying to get free” (9; emphasis added), she endures this strange epidermal growth until she is entirely covered by plants (10). After this incident, and as the ability grows more widespread among adolescents, there is a common experience that all protagonists in the novel share: The plants want to break free, and quickly. They are “desperate to grow” (69), “trying to squeeze free” (90), “eager and ready” to get out (90), or signal a “desire to grow big and strong and stretch tall” (331, emphasis added). In terms strongly suggestive of independent will, or “intentionality” as Germaine terms it (2023: 164), plants are portrayed as desiring agents that are compelled by the impulse to expand. This much is clear, although the plants never articulate this desire and appear as an ‘it’ within a narrative that is “very traditionally narrated by a third-person narrator and closely focalized through one of the protagonists” (Vanhove and De Backer 2025: 8). The result is a mix of covertly expressed nonhuman desires narrated through human characters. The fact that plant subjectivity is not constituted monolithically or independ‐ ently may seem strange to begin with. Is the nonhuman only representable through humanist modes of telling? And do plants thus mainly fulfil “their narrative role in ‘empowering’ the greenfingers”, as Germaine ventures (2023: 163)? “Narrative is on some level dependent upon personal experience and gross contact for its inspiration and content”, notes Brian Treanor (2014: 99). In this sense, a less flattering verdict might be that the novel fails to let go DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 Rhizomic Minds: Transversal Perspective in Lauren James’s Green Rising 283 of anthropocentric perspectives by reverting back to human experientiality, especially if one acknowledges that the teenager’s symbiosis with plants has an expiry date when the climate catastrophe has been averted at the end of the novel. A more favourable reading might recognise the attempts to integrate vegetal desire into a shared perspective that challenges distinction to celebrate relation. As mentioned earlier, this can produce an alternative to granting nonhumans “the roles of narrator, character, and focalizer in a narrative text” (Shang 2022: 59) without necessarily making it all about humans again. This is the path that I opt for in this essay. Given the idiosyncratic structure of plant desire in the text, I remain hesitant as to whether the kinetic longing indexed above is an example of an autonomous “subjectivity of plants” (Germaine 164). To me, the narrative rather seems to - staying with vegetal metaphors - implant relation and co-action in creating a shared perspective. It is therefore useful to approach these strange vegetal urges from two different angles: The first is consciousness, the second desire. Lars Bernaerts et al. note that “the evocation of consciousness” can be strategic in narrative approaches to nonhuman perspective (2014: 75). In Green Rising, plant desire seems conscious, though not necessarily subjective; this difference is important. From a posthumanist angle, “[i]t can no longer be safely assumed that conscious‐ ness coincides with subjectivity”, Braidotti reminds us (2008: 184). Accepting consciousness as “a derivative mode of relating to one’s own environment” (Braidotti 2016: 26), may provide the necessary framework to “[d]esubjectify consciousness”, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (2013: 156). This is relevant, because the type of plant consciousness in Green Rising avoids subjective constructions like ‘I think’ or ‘I feel’. Confirming “a kind of acephalous thinking, which happens without some material centre devoted to the orchestration of cognisance” (Brits 2018: 97), readers learn what plants want by the direction they enforce. Resonant with rhizomes as “directions in motion” (Deleuze and Guattari 2013: 22), this type of consciousness explicitly specialises in movement. More indebted to the spatial dimension of perspective defined as “the appearance of viewed objects with regard to relative position” (“Perspective, N., Sense I.5”), vegetal viewpoint is expressed less in narrative subjectivity than in a sense of direction (out) and deixis (away from or out of human corporeal substratum), but never in predetermined paths and never orchestrated by one central directive unit. The kind of consciousness accorded to plants in the novel hence indexes a desire that is kinetically driven. I purposefully reiterate the word ‘desire’ used by James (2021: 331) because it invites associations with Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of the term in A Thousand Plateaus. Positing that “it is always by DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 284 Sarah Wegener 4 See Roberts (2021) for a more detailed discussion on the theoretical development of desire in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. rhizome that desire moves and produces” (2013: 14), they stress that desire is always dynamically oriented toward forming and entering assemblages: “Assemblages are […] compositions of desire” (465). 4 Therefore, and especially in connection with the kinetic consciousness that plants are accorded in the text, desire strives for connection, not individuation. Insights from Critical Plant Studies reveal that the guiding purpose of plants, namely “outward growth and augmentation” (Marder 2013: 12) is not entirely dissimilar from desire. As Michael Marder explains, plants are “wholly oriented to the other without establishing either an identity or a self-identity” (12). Germaine accordingly notes that “[p]lant-thinking, in its appeal to the eruptive growth of plant life, the rhizomatic openness and proliferation of vegetal being” is a strong fit for the “child-plant connections” in James’s novel (2023: 158 f.). Adding to that, I believe that the rejection of identity and desire for community stressed here is vital to understanding perspective in the novel. There is no self-identical vegetal voice, no vegetal I that transmits its ambition to grow. Everything readers learn about plants is expressed in the desire for a directional relation to their kindred humans. By “searching for any cracks in [their] composure” and by “investigating the boundaries” ( James 2021: 90, 208), vegetal agents indicate a perspective in relation to humans, without relying on anthropocentric super-structures like subjectivity or identity. Instead, plants communicate via electrical currents. For the characters, this causes a “wriggly feeling” (66), “a buzz or a niggle” (65), or simply a “vibrating energy in [their] mind” (65; see also Germaine 2023: 164). The novel is hence very precise in its cerebral location of those sensations: “You should be able to feel it [. . .] at the back of your mind”, suggests a side-character fittingly named Daisy (65), and male protagonist Theo experiences “an electric tingle at the base of his skull before the stems bloomed from his skin” (66). The expressions used here infer electrical stimuli produced by the nonhuman vegetation on neuronal level prompting physical actions. In neuroscience “electrical signals that are transmitted along our nerve and muscle fibres” are called “action potentials”, which are “essential for the communication of information to, from, and within the brain” (Ashcroft 2003). In Green Rising, the kinetic dimension of plant desire functions like an action potential that brings growth signals to their human hosts’ conscious awareness. “His mind followed its movements”, Theo comments on this transsubjective kinetic experience ( James 2021: 206). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 Rhizomic Minds: Transversal Perspective in Lauren James’s Green Rising 285 Sensitive to the plants’ electrical stimuli, human minds become extensions of rhizomic vegetal motion. Especially when it comes to cerebral structures, and beyond the mere didactic function of this choice, I find it relevant that the human hosts in James’ s novel are teenagers. This aspect has to do with hormones stimulating both human and vegetal growth. While “plants do not generally qualify as having intelligence […] due to their lack of neuronal and synaptic structures”, as Ben Woodard points out, they are generally accorded “hormonal sentience” (2018: 133). They regulate growth, adapt to diverse soils, ambient conditions, or other external factors via “stress hormones and allelochemicals” (Boyno and Demir 2022: 156; see also Woodard 2018: 133). In James’s novel, teenage brains replace the soil through which plants usually dissipate their hormones. Adolescent brains, however, are subject to increased “hormonal stress reactivity” due to cerebral reconstruction (Romeo 2013: 142). Since “synaptic pruning” determines which cerebral links are strengthened as humans become adults (Blakemore 2012: 398), the teenagers’ continued sensitivity to electrical plant stimuli makes it likely that those impulses will become in-built currents in their brains. By means of hormonal exchange between strangely sentient plants and teenage brains, Green Rising hence permanently fuses neurological and botanical channels of coordination and cooperation. Eventually, this suggests a rhizomic brain structure that forms an intricate and interwoven network of desire and motion. In a brain like this, can plant impulse and human cognition still be productively held apart? “Her power was repulsed”: Affective explosions While the cerebral location of plant desire seems to emphasise a hierarchy of cognition, it is important to note that plant perspective understood as desire in direction and relation is embodied in James’s novel. Plants may infuse and influence the human brain, but their proliferations are heterogeneous. Plants grow from palms ( James 2021: 39), throats and mouths (21 f.), noses and ears (60), stomachs (69), lungs (86), skin (86), and even eyes (339). Holistically dubbed “power” by the human protagonists (66), plant energy - James’s version of zoe - forms impermanent nodes with human body parts that are momentarily cultivated and discontinued in uneven intervals. There is no single root, stem, or growth axis, but a multitude of irregular and changing points of horizontal connections. Like rhizomes, the human-plant composites in Green Rising are governed by “multiplicity” (Deleuze and Guattari 2013: 7) and they are “detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable” (22). Expressive of the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 286 Sarah Wegener “ongoing deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations” of “rhizomic networks” (Finzi 2024: 12 f.), plants and humans partake in versatile assemblages without temporary or spatial boundaries. In the novel, this is demonstrated most strongly by the plants’ tendency to explode. Female protagonist Hester is mortified as “[a]lgae exploded from her palms” ( James 2021: 28). Similarly, Theo cannot contain the “seaweed” that “exploded from him, spraying the ground in green sludge” (62). I believe that the explosive gush of greenery reiterated time and again throughout the text again signals central rhizomic principles: Explosions are chaotic and devoid of clear beginning and endings, they only have “a middle (milieu)”, and they upturn subject and object, agent and recipient (Deleuze and Guattari 2013: 22). In Green Rising, explosions put humans virtually in the middle of the spillage - they become a milieu. This shifts these events much closer to “becomings”, fittingly described as “an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome” by Deleuze and Guattari (9). Confirming Marder’s proposition that “[p]lant-thinking starts with the explosion of identity” (2013: 43), botanical outbreaks virtually explode linear notions of subjectivity. Instead, the central dominating force is multiplication. In explosions, the characters become objects of and subjects to heterogeneity. These moments of explosive chaos emphasise that the dominating force in human-plant relations is affect. The corporeal openness to plant outbreaks mirrors the “prepersonal intensity” (Massumi 2019: xv) that “is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin - at the surface of the body, at its interface with things”, to draw on Brian Massumi’s conceptualisation of affect (1995: 85). As a literal “point of emergence” (94), affect in Green Rising marks a moment where subject and object, human and nonhuman are indeterminate. “In between lies a continuum of existence differentiated into levels, or regions of potential, between which there are no boundaries, only dynamic thresholds”, writes Massumi (99), which works as an apt summary for the way in which corporeal and plant matter continue to affect each other in the novel. Hester, for instance, sprouts plants as “an extension of her body” ( James 2021: 90) and Theo experiences “a sense of drowning” when plants are flooded by water (209), and a mouthwatering sensation when he thinks of forestry (92). Affect hence revokes the distinction between vegetal and human bodies and celebrates “zoe as the liminal condition of the living subject” (Braidotti 2008: 181). The novel’s insistence on visceral and epidermal affect, I suggest, foregrounds the prolific and transindividual energy of zoe. As the story progresses, affect plays a vital part in character development. The young adults’ attitudes, tastes, and bodily desires, it turns out, are not quite DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 Rhizomic Minds: Transversal Perspective in Lauren James’s Green Rising 287 5 Since those very chemicals are also responsible for the emergence of the greenfingers’ abilities by “horizontal genetic transfer” (Germaine 2023: 160), the chain of cause, effect, and affect points towards a decidedly anthropogenic organisation and hierarchisation of ecological systems, which complicates the novel’s take-down of hierarchies as much as its final resolution. personal. Hester, in particular, experiences plants “feeding on her excitement” ( James 2021: 28), “digging livid red thorns into her skins” as she grows angry (61), or even “tendrils tickling her ribs” when she is nervous and upset (81). While I agree with Germaine that “plants come to express human emotion” (2023: 164), the text also mirrors the ecological dimension of being affected by nonhuman matter. Affect has larger consequences for viewpoint, since plants contribute towards a joint perspective viscerally and affectively, but not verbally. This is made explicit as Hester notices that her taste has been altered by her vegetal symbionts: “She hesitated over drinks. Recently, she hadn’t been able to stand drinking anything except spring water. She could taste the chemicals in everything else. Her power was repulsed by it” ( James 2021: 75). 5 Again, the nonhuman perspective is interconnected, both affectively and narratively. Curiously, plants are sentient enough to feel disgust. As Sara Ahmed notes, disgust is “an intense bodily feeling of being sickened, is always directed towards an object. One does not feel disgust in the abstract; one feels disgusted by something in which the thing itself seems to repel us” (2014: 85). Disgust thus requires a body, a self who can be disgusted, as well as an object against which disgust is directed. Since Hester is affected by the plants’ visceral disgust for chemicals, the girl and her chlorophyllian companions work as an embodiment of zoe where affectivity invalidates corporeal limit. Intensifying the plants’ ability to affect taste, a mutually beneficial circulation of nutrients connects human and plant bodies: “Alisha’s skin had recently taken on a green tint. Apparently, she didn’t really get hungry any more. The chlorophyll fed on sunlight and kept her full” ( James 2021: 188). I believe that Vanhove and De Backer’s claim that “[t]he plant-young adult hybrid depicts an exaggeration of our entanglement with the non-human” (2025: 8) also applies vice versa. By depicting the bilateral dimension of affect, the text reveals that the nonhuman is just as entangled with us (see also Germaine 2023: 159). It is a matter of perspective, between becoming-plant and becoming-human. It is important to mention, however, that symbiotic relations are represented as selective and specialised, since not every plant will answer to every teenager in the story. Confirming a “vegetal democracy” (Germaine 2023: 176), this explicitly denies that humans are in control. Exemplary for a “renouncement of hierarchies” in symbiotic relations (Paraschiv 2022: 146), humans in the novel do DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 288 Sarah Wegener not instrumentalise plants for their gain as in agricultural relations (Atchinson 2018: 25-56), but they are actively chosen by nonhuman organisms. While Hester embodies the transsubjective side of human-nonhuman affect, James uses Theo to explore a mutually concessive symbiosis. From the beginning of the novel, Theo feels inadequate since he can “only grow boring seaweed” ( James 2021: 38). It takes half of the novel for him to realise that “[t]the plants he’d tried to make didn’t align with what his body wanted to produce” (159). But is it really his body alone that wants? Theo indeed realises that “his power didn’t want to make plants at all. It wanted to make fungi” (159; emphases added). Once more, I consider these narrative choices a vital strategy to stress the relationality of perspective. The synonymy between ‘his body’, the ’power’ and ‘it’ suggests that they cannot be kept apart. Even more than providing a framework “that is inclusive of human and vegetal subjectivities and makes porous the border between them” (Germaine 2023: 164), the novel seems to complicate the very notion of subjectivity in its discursive representations while keeping it integral to its narration. Reciprocal affect speaks for a continuous ‘becoming’, that exemplifies Braidotti’s idea of “transversal subjectivity” (2016: 27). The result is a perspective built on and embracing it, I, and we. “A fluttering, lively thing”: Becoming nonhuman? This essay has so far covered instances of a cross-species perspective that embraces vegetal desires, tastes, and attitudes into the teens’ focalised narrative. By the end of the novel, however, something strange happens that allows nonhuman perspectives a greater narratological space. To save the earth, the teens must eventually combine and use their skills excessively. In consequence, plant matter becomes an ingrown, cellular part of their progressively verdant bodies (Germaine 2023: 176 f.). As fungi cover him almost entirely, Theo notices that his skin is lichenoid: “When he tried to peel them away, it sent a sharp stab of pain through his nerves” ( James 2021: 325; see also Haddow 2025: 116). The cognitive and affective impact of plants intensifies as Theo realises that “[t]hey weren’t growing plants now - they were becoming them” (326). The progressive verb used here is strongly resonant with Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that becoming does not mean merely “imitating, or identifying with something” but entering into “assemblages” (2013: 279, 282). In becoming-plant, the young adults materialise this conjecture, corroborating Haraway’s claim that “becoming is always becoming with” (2008: 244; original emphasis). This overthrows the subject. In asserting that “becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself ”, Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the fact that the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 Rhizomic Minds: Transversal Perspective in Lauren James’s Green Rising 289 subject endlessly “coexists” with others in assemblages (2013: 278). In Green Rising, this principle is taken up as Theo is “transformed” into a mycological organism ( James 2021: 344). In what Haddow terms “body-horror” (2025: 116), the boy is gradually bereft of his human form. Turned wooden, his bones break, he goes blind, and his lungs are full of lethal spores ( James 2021: 338 f., 344 f.). As he grows cold and still, subject and object distinctions become fuzzy on the textual level: Time had lost meaning. The dull, deep thud of his heart slowed. Then there was a sharp burst of heat: something warm and living, pressed against him. A fluttering lively thing; too quick and frantic to follow. It was almost annoying, in his calm state. But there was something familiar about the flavour of the magic. The thing kissed him with strangely human lips. Its chest rose against his. Forcing his lungs to remember their form. Hester? He asked the figure of warmth, from deep inside his mind. (348) I find it important that this “collapse of bodily boundaries” (Germaine 2023: 171) is also linguistic, which confirms the way in which language is used throughout the novel to indicate that mutual affect and language are cognate. Grammatically revealing, the pronouns used to denote human and vegetal agents throughout the novel are reversed: he is fungi and a subject, it is a human “thing”, an object. Interestingly, what might be negatively considered as a harbinger of death just sparks another life form. This, in turn, resonates with Braidotti’s idea that the body’s progressive passage towards death makes visible the “positivity of zoe” (2008: 181). Becoming-fungi means that, for the first time in the story, the perspective of zoe is shifted to the foreground, comically by describing humans as over-frantic organisms. Suddenly, rootedness is no longer a marker of insentience and stillness does not index absent thought (Woodard 2018: 132). Quite the contrary is true: “his bones and organs abandoned the over-complicated, stress-ridden form of a mammal. He had shed the useless parts and returned to his roots”, fungi-Theo muses ( James 2021: 348). Figuring human characteristics as “useless” in their hectic agitation revokes the anthropocentric divide of the moving human subject and the immovable plant, producing what Vanhove and De Backer fittingly term “an intersubjective, collective identity” (2025: 8; see also Haddow 2025: 114). The narrative strategy used throughout the novel seems to pay off here, because the inversion of viewpoint follows the same implanted structure, only that humans are now imagined at the other end of this relation. Therefore, the choice is ultimately not made between human or nonhuman subjectivity, but rather between parts of a collective that get to utter their DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 290 Sarah Wegener 6 It is worth mentioning that the novel itself blends not only character and plant perspec‐ tives, but also different media representations of the greenfinger story, from chats and blogs to newspaper coverage. As Vanhove and De Backer point out, “these collective communications function like a mycorrhizal network” that interlinks individuals (2025: 8). Since those narratives are of human origin, however, the mycelium serves only as a metaphor for what are, at heart, anthropocentric perspectives, albeit collective rather than individual ones. perspective at any given time. 6 While the above scene certainly celebrates juve‐ nile heroism, I disagree with Haddow’s more fatalistic reading of thanatophilic teenagers where “[t]he child has to die so that the planet does not” (2025: 116). First, because even in their hybridised state, they continue to contribute to a shared viewpoint, just like the plants did before. And second, because the children do not really die and they do not stay hybrid. In what seems like a disappointingly humanist backflip, their final stage of posthuman assemblage does not last. In a desperate gesture, Theo emerges from his fungi state: “He tugged his head above the water. Human. He was human” ( James 2021: 349). This overemphasis on regained human cognition and hierarchy of perspective builds an irritating finale to an experimental project, especially since the remaining pages are dedicated to the teens shaping their bright and thoroughly human futures while “their odd plant-like characteristics had started to fade away” (364). While the novel for the most part indeed endorses a worldview where “the autonomous self and autonomous agency are anthropocentric fictions”, and “bounded human subjectivity” is a “myth” (Germaine 2023: 175, 188), it falls back into humanist habits precisely after its grand finale. This sadly reverses the process of becoming and ends on a thoroughly anthropocentric note: once humans are safe again, plants are no longer needed as helpful symbionts. Their dynamic other-than-human perspective is again rooted in silence. Conclusion In Green Rising, plants do not speak. Neither do they act independently, nor do they share their thoughts directly. Nonetheless, James’s narrative lets readers in on what its vegetal organisms desire and dislike. Confirming that “[h]uman and non-human experientiality are always caught up in a dialectic” (Bernaerts et al. 2014: 89), the novel shows that viewpoint and perception, too, are assembled from both human and vegetal experience. The notions of rhizome and zoe have proven suitable to explore this. Relational and affective, human-plant perspective suspends hierarchies, celebrates reciprocal, embodied affect, and ‘deterritorialises’ the subject in a rhizomic manner. The novel hence resonates DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 Rhizomic Minds: Transversal Perspective in Lauren James’s Green Rising 291 with a posthumanist insistence on “a lively and agential more-than-human network of relationality” (Marchand 2018: 294). To me, the important takeaway of this novel is its experimentation with a post-anthropocentric perspective that is plural, multidirectional, and heterogeneous, but not representable along the binary lines of human and nonhuman and no longer necessarily bound to exclusivist subjective modes of speaking or thinking. That this is an ambitious literary project becomes clear as the novel struggles to uphold its strategies consistently until the end. Perhaps this just confirms Braidotti’s premise that “[p]osthuman subjects are a work-in-progress” (2019: 1187). The novel’s ulti‐ mate loss of perspectival entanglements and return to conservative humanist modes of experience reveals that, unfamiliar as it is, there is more room for creative approaches to make a more transversal perspective last. Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2004. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer‐ sity Press. Ashcroft, Frances. 2003. “Action Potentials”. In: Blakemore, Colin/ Jennet, Sheila, eds. 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DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0014 294 Sarah Wegener Contributors Emily Aline Anderson is a PhD candidate at Universität Konstanz and is currently working on her thesis “Old Magic, New Realities: New Perspectives on Contemporary Magical Realism”. Her fields of interest include contemporary anglophone and world literature, fantastic literature as well as queer and feminist theory. Jochen Achilles is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Würzburg and Adjunct Professor at the University of Mainz. His authored book publications include studies on the development of Sean O'Casey's plays and on the interface between the gothic tradition and psychological fiction, focusing on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. He co-edited volumes on Irish drama, modern drama, representations of evil in fiction and film, and on liminality and the short story. His research interests and numerous articles focus on cultural identities, Irish and American (short) fiction and drama. He is a founding member of the European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR) and member of the Society for the Study of the American Short Story (SSASS). Julia Boll is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Univer‐ sity of Salzburg. She is co-convener of the International Federation for Theatre Research's political performances working group and of the Scottish Literature and Culture Network. Her work is located in the area of ethics, politics, literature and theatre. Her monograph The New War Plays was published in 2013, and her second book, Scapegoats, Devils, Outlaws, Witches: Bare Life's Lives on the Medieval, Early Modern, and Contemporary Stage, is under review. Xaver Boxhammer is research assistant and PhD student at LMU Munich. His research focuses on remediation in contemporary digital games, with particular interest in the representation of remediated media artefacts in apocalyptic game worlds. James Dowthwaite is Junior Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. His books include Ezra Pound and 20th Century Theories of Language: Faith with the Word (Routledge, 2019) and Aesthetic Criticism: An Introduction (Routledge 2026). Forthcoming work includes a new edition of the two books of the Rhymers' Club for the MHRA DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0015 Press's Jewelled Tortoise imprint, and his own collection of poems, Babylonian Pieces: A Dream Vision (Artel, 2026). Paul Fagan is a research fellow at LMU Munich and a founding general editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies. He is the co-editor of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (Bloomsbury, 2021), Finnegans Wake - Human and Nonhuman Histories (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), and five Flann O’Brien essay collections with Cork University Press, most recently Flann O'Brien and the Nonhuman: Environments, Animals, Machines (2024). He has also edited the special issues Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural circulation (Irish Studies in Europe, 2021) and-Celibacy in Irish Women’s Writing-(Humanities, 2026). Wolfgang Funk is a researcher and lecturer in English Literature and Culture at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz with a focus on Victorian poetry, contemporary fiction and literary form. He is the author of The Literature of Reconstruction: Authentic Fiction in the New Millennium (2015) and an introduc‐ tion to Gender Studies (2024). He is the co-editor of The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real (2012) as well as special issues of EJES on Poetry, Science and Technology (2018) and JSBC on Victorian Reproductions (2025). Laura Handl is a research assistant and PhD candidate at the Dresden University of Technology in the field of American Studies. She holds a BA in media communication (2016) and an MA in literature and culture studies with a focus on English and American Studies (2022). While working on a dissertation on the politics of anger in contemporary queer/ feminist manifestos, her further research interests include queer/ feminist narratology, media studies and critique. Irmtraud Huber is Professor of English Literature and Literary Theory at Universität Konstanz. Her work focuses on Victorian poetry and contemporary fiction with a particular interest in literary form and aesthetics of time and she has published three monographs, Literature after Postmodernism (2014, Palgrave), Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction (2016, Palgrave) and Time and Timelessness in Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). She is co-editor of a Handbook of Poetic Forms (de Gruyter, 2025). Alexander Scherr is a researcher in anglophone literatures and cultures who has taught at the Universities of Giessen, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Bonn. He recently completed the manuscript for a monograph on essayistic forms of life in the anglophone novel, which emerged from a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). His work on narrative theory, the anglophone novel and essay, literature and science, Romantic and Gothic literature, and the DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0015 296 Contributors documentary film has appeared in several edited collections and peer-reviewed journals including Style, Anglia, Anglistik, Amerikastudien / American Studies, and On_Culture. His first monograph on Narrating Evolution was published with WVT in 2017. Sina Schuhmaier is an academic staff member at the University of Mannheim. She is currently working on a research project that investigates narratives of contagious disease in the context of the British empire, including literary and non-fictional depictions of the Middle Passage. Her research spans the medical humanities, material ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies. Her first monograph Changing the Record: Englishness, Popular Music, and the Song Lyric in the 21st Century is forthcoming with Routledge. Sarah Wegener teaches English literature and culture at the Johannes Gu‐ tenberg-Universität Mainz. Her doctoral research focused on motherhood in Victorian science and poetry, and her recent publications include a co-edited special issue of the Journal for the Study of British Cultures on the topic of “Vic‐ torian Reproductions” (2024), and an article on “The Closed Buds of Decadence: Reproductive Idleness in the Poetry of Alice Meynell and Rosamund Marriott Watson” in Anglia (2025). Her present research specialises in contemporary eco-fiction. Raphael Zähringer (University of Tübingen) is a postdoc in English Literatures and Cultures with a focus on Irish Studies, crisis narratives, science fiction, and media epistemology. His first monograph explored urban dystopias (Hidden Topographies: Traces of Reality in Dystopian Fiction; De Gruyter, 2017); the second one is called Writing Crisis: Ireland, 1596-2018 (forthcoming). His most recent research project is the Tübingen Database of Irish Science Fiction (TDISF). DOI 10.24053/ REAL-40-0015 Contributors 297 Index aesthetics 28, 30, 35, 49, 52, 55, 58-61, 63 f., 69, 80, 91, 93, 95, 98, 100 f., 105, 111, 113, 115, 118 ff., 139, 146, 223 f. affect 12, 18, 27, 32, 41, 44, 49, 54, 56, 61, 80, 84, 90, 95, 100, 115, 119, 136-140, 146, 149, 152, 195, 199, 208, 210, 218, 220, 222, 244, 279, 281 f., 286-291 agency-12 f., 15 f., 18 f., 32, 51, 54 f., 64, 68, 70, 74-80, 82, 84 f., 90 f., 100, 104 f., 123 f., 136, 139, 141, 144 f., 149 ff., 158, 160, 168 f., 176, 186, 222, 225, 239 f., 243 ff., 253, 261 f., 266, 277 f., 287, 291 f. agential realism-13, 82, 258 Ahmed, Sara-138, 288 ahumanism-15, 25, 27 ff., 44 alterity-→ othering anger-17, 115, 123, 125, 135-141, 145, 147, 149 ff., 209, 288 animal-9-12, 14, 16 ff., 32 f., 35-38, 41, 59, 79 f., 89 f., 92 ff., 100-103, 105, 111 f., 114-117, 120-123, 125 f., 142, 146, 157, 159, 162-166, 168 f., 173-177, 179, 181 f., 184-188, 192, 195-199, 203 ff., 207 f., 211 ff., 218, 222 f., 232, 265, 278 cat-16, 18, 38, 92, 113, 121, 123, 125 f., 128, 173, 192, 195, 205, 217-221, 223 ff., 227, 229, 231, 233 f. fox-14, 17 f., 67, 79 ff., 84, 174 f., 178 f., 181-191 mouse-18, 200 ff., 207, 211 animal studies-9, 14, 17, 173, 177, 195 Anthropocene 9, 11, 17, 19, 26 f., 156 f., 175, 179, 244, 259 ff., 266, 270, 272 anthropocentrism-8-11, 13, 15-19, 25, 28, 33, 35-40, 42 f., 51, 54, 61, 63, 67 f., 76 f., 80, 89 ff., 95, 97 ff., 103 ff., 117 ff., 122, 126, 128 ff., 155 ff., 160 f., 163, 165 f., 168 f., 173, 175-178, 182, 184 f., 187 f., 190, 192, 196, 198, 201 f., 204, 211 f., 218, 222, 225, 232, 234, 239, 241, 244 f., 254, 278 f., 284 f., 290 ff. anthropomorphism-7, 10 f., 17 f., 37, 54 f., 80, 90, 103, 125, 180, 186, 196-200, 205, 208, 212, 223 antihumanism-26 apocalypse-16, 113, 115, 119, 124, 126 ff., 130, 225, 271 art-15, 28, 30, 35, 50, 52, 56 f., 62, 93, 141, 263, 265 artificial intelligence-12, 27, 29, 91, 94, 98, 231 f. assemblage-12, 19, 31 f., 52, 93 f., 118, 222, 253 f., 277 f., 282 f., 285, 287, 289 ff. Barad, Karen 13, 68, 77 f., 82, 241, 243, 258, 266 Barbauld, Anna Letitia-199 f., 202, 204, 207 f., 211 Bennett, Jane 12 f., 18, 31 f., 34 f., 37, 39, 42, 51, 240, 253 Braidotti, Rosi-13, 54, 61, 175 f., 277, 279 f., 282 ff., 287, 289 f., 292 capitalism 10, 36, 42, 82, 112, 217, 221, 229, 233 f., 246 catharsis-136, 140, 147, 151 civilisation-27, 36, 44, 71 ff., 93, 117, 128, 187 climate-13, 19, 111, 123, 130, 192, 260, 266, 272, 277, 283 f. closure-76, 84 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor-19, 123, 257, 261 ff., 271 f. communication-11 ff., 19, 31, 44, 50, 59 f., 62 f., 80, 94 f., 145, 163 ff., 175, 181, 187, 198 ff., 205, 209 f., 219, 221, 245, 249 ff., 253 f., 282, 285 community 25, 28, 36, 39, 42, 158, 225, 228, 285 companion species-33 f., 38, 55, 178, 224, 277 contagion-19, 241 f., 245 f., 248 f., 253 Cranor, Jeffrey-17, 136 f., 140 f., 144-147, 150 crisis-13, 15, 25, 119, 130, 227, 233, 243, 257 f., 272, 284 death-68, 71, 73, 75 f., 78 f., 81, 83, 92-95, 103, 136, 142, 145, 147, 149 ff., 174, 191, 210 f., 213, 225, 253, 290 f. decentring (the human)-11-14, 18, 27, 54, 76, 84 f., 91, 94, 98 f., 103 ff., 176, 181, 199, 218, 239, 278 f. defamiliarisation-10 f., 18, 198, 210, 217 ff., 232 Defoe, Daniel-19, 239-249, 251-254 Deleuze, Gilles-90, 222, 277-282, 284, 286 f., 289 Derrida, Jacques-13, 17 f., 125, 173 ff., 177, 181, 187 f., 192, 195 f., 198 f., 207, 213, 252 Descartes, René-30, 173, 176 digital games-10, 14 ff., 18, 89-105, 217- 221, 223-228, 234 domination 36, 39, 51, 71, 77, 80 f., 117, 138, 140, 151, 157, 160 f., 169, 280 ecocentrism-15, 25, 27, 33-36, 38-41, 43, 104 ecocriticism-14, 28, 90, 111, 218, 239 f., 242 f., 252 ecology-11, 15, 19, 25, 27, 29, 31 f., 34 f., 42 f., 51, 69, 71, 74, 76 f., 79, 82, 84, 104, 129, 168, 228, 233, 239, 243, 280, 282, 288 economy-29, 42, 120, 246 ff., 250 f. ecosystem-12, 90-95, 99, 101, 103 ff., 157, 239 Eliot, T. S.-53, 61 f. embodiment 9 f., 12, 16, 18 f., 27, 29, 32, 51, 53 f., 67, 73-78, 83, 90, 100, 113, 117 ff., 123-126, 129, 132, 145, 156 f., 159-162, 176, 178, 186, 195, 197, 201-204, 207- 211, 213, 218 f., 222, 225, 231, 239, 242- 246, 250-253, 264, 268, 278-284, 286- 290 emergence-16, 70, 77 f., 80, 89, 91, 98-101, 104, 181, 287 Emerson, Ralph Waldo-40 f. emotion-10, 17, 29, 39, 43, 49, 53, 94, 105, 114, 116 f., 125, 136-139, 143 f., 147, 151, 161, 164, 178, 210, 217, 225, 228, 281, 288 empathy-10, 18, 43 f., 51, 71, 90, 111, 164, 168, 181 f., 198, 201 f., 204, 209 f., 217 f., 222, 224 f., 228 f., 232, 234 entanglement-9, 14, 19, 55, 68, 74-78, 82, 84, 90, 95, 112, 169, 239 f., 244, 253 f., 260, 278, 288, 292 environment 11, 17, 19, 27, 35 ff., 39 f., 43 f., 49, 64, 68, 71, 78, 82 f., 89, 93 f., 100 f., 112, 119, 124, 126, 166 f., 169, 175, 179 f., 189 f., 196, 220, 225, 234, 239, 244, 265 f., 269, 281 f., 284 ethics 9, 13, 19, 28, 31, 52, 67-70, 72, 75-78, 80 f., 84 f., 114, 116, 120, 122, 155, 174 f., 239, 260 experientiality-→ embodiment fable-10, 80, 178 f., 182, 185, 187-190, 196 feminism-14, 33, 41, 112-123, 125 f., 128, 136-140, 142 f., 156 ecofeminism-16, 71, 111-118, 120 f., Index 299 124, 126 ff., 130 Fforde, Jasper-7, 17, 175, 181 ff., 185 f., 188, 191 film-10, 16, 67-72, 74 ff., 78-84, 135, 146, 181 Fink, Joseph-17, 136 f., 140 f., 144-147, 150 fungi-19, 280, 289 ff. game studies-223 gaze-13, 18, 40, 111, 125, 128, 149, 162, 173 ff., 177, 181, 192, 195-199, 202, 204- 209, 213 gender-16 f., 43, 112, 115, 118, 125 f., 129, 137 ff., 147, 157, 166, 177, 188, 221 female-16 f., 37, 39, 58, 75, 84, 111- 117, 119-129, 135, 137 ff., 141 ff., 157, 159 f., 162 ff., 166-169, 175, 188, 202, 204, 266 male 11, 38-42, 58, 62, 72, 84, 115, 117- 122, 124 f., 128 ff., 138, 140, 142 f., 145, 147, 150 f., 158 f., 161 f., 187, 203 f., 221, 266 f., 285 queer-16, 73, 81, 113 genre 10, 19, 27, 91 f., 94, 96-99, 135 f., 138, 140 f., 143-146, 155, 196, 271, 277 ghost 15 f., 59, 61, 67 f., 74-78, 84, 174, 177, 179, 188, 197, 211, 248, 253, 271 Guattari, Félix 90, 222, 278-282, 284, 286 f., 289 Hall, Sarah-17, 175, 181, 186, 188 Haraway, Donna-9, 13, 16, 31, 33 ff., 37 ff., 42, 55, 57, 61, 68 f., 82, 175, 177, 233, 277, 282, 289 Hayles, Katherine-31-35, 39, 42, 277, 282 Haynes, Natalie-17, 136 f., 140-143, 146, 148 f. Heidegger, Martin-196 heroism-58, 67 f., 70 f., 73, 75, 78, 82, 84 f., 91, 136, 139 ff., 143, 146, 148, 188, 204, 231, 265, 291 heterotopia-25, 37 Hughes, Ted-199, 205, 207 f. human-7 ff., 11, 15 ff., 25, 28, 32 f., 38 f., 49 ff., 54, 58-61, 63 f., 70, 76, 80, 90 f., 104, 119, 121, 129, 136, 145, 157, 159, 161, 166, 169, 174-177, 179, 187, 189, 195, 199, 204, 225, 228, 232, 242 f., 252, 260 f., 264, 268, 272, 280-283, 290 human exceptionalism 13, 15 ff., 30, 34, 89, 91, 119, 178, 239, 244, 277 human-nonhuman- dualism-54, 91, 95, 120, 166, 176 relation-8, 11 f., 15 ff., 32-35, 37, 44, 50 ff., 55, 67 ff., 73 ff., 78, 84, 90, 117, 128, 173, 175, 188, 200, 209 f., 213, 224, 226, 229 f., 234, 271, 277 ff., 289 illness-187, 227, 240-254 individualism-82, 228 f., 233, 235 James, Lauren-19, 277 ff., 283-291 Jewett, Sarah Orne-15, 27, 35-44 Kant, Immanuel-30, 40, 176 Keats, John-15, 49 ff., 53-64, 258, 269 Kendall, May-199, 202 ff., 208 language-8, 17, 36, 59 f., 62, 95 ff., 128, 164 f., 174 f., 177 f., 181 f., 189, 192, 195-200, 205, 208-214, 240, 242 f., 246, 251 ff., 258, 261, 267, 290 life-9, 17 f., 26, 29, 31 f., 37, 40, 42 ff., 56 f., 60-63, 68 ff., 73, 75 f., 78 f., 81 ff., 85, 90, 93 f., 111, 119, 123 f., 127, 145, 150, 159, 162, 174, 176, 185, 200 f., 211, 220, 228, 232 f., 240, 244, 253, 268, 282, 287, 290 liminality-14, 25, 27 f., 31 f., 34, 38 f., 43 f., 69, 79 ff., 84, 124, 137, 157, 160, 164, 166, 169, 178 f., 225, 287 Lowery, David-16, 67-71, 74 ff., 78, 80, 82, 84 magical realism-17, 155 f., 162, 169 Massumi, Brian-281, 287 300 Index materialism 39, 42, 52, 56, 62, 122, 129, 243, 259, 263 new materialism-14, 51, 54, 111, 118, 239 f., 243, 259 matter 9, 12 ff., 18 f., 27, 29, 31-35, 37, 50 ff., 56, 63, 69, 77 f., 80, 94 f., 117, 125, 178, 201, 212, 239-242, 244-248, 250-254, 258, 261-266, 268, 271, 277, 280 f., 284, 287 ff. metaphor-10, 30 f., 35, 37, 39 f., 60, 124 f., 137, 142, 159, 178 f., 196, 202, 209, 239, 243-248, 251, 253, 258, 264, 281, 284 microbe-19, 239 f., 243 f., 248, 252, 254 microbiome-239 monster-17, 41, 56, 127, 135 f., 140, 143 ff., 147, 149 ff., 156, 158, 177, 248, 253 Morgan, Edwin-7, 11 Murray, Les-199, 208 ff. narrative-10, 16-19, 27, 33 f., 36, 43 f., 52, 67, 69 f., 75, 77, 79 f., 84, 89 ff., 93-99, 104 f., 120, 124 f., 127 f., 135-148, 150 f., 155, 158, 165, 170, 177, 189, 197, 218, 234, 245, 250 ff., 279, 283 f., 289 ff. narratology-9, 219, 278 f., 289 nature-13, 15 f., 18 f., 25, 27 f., 32 ff., 36-40, 42 ff., 58, 64, 67, 69 ff., 73 f., 76, 78-84, 90, 92 ff., 97, 111 f., 117 ff., 123, 127, 157, 160 f., 163, 166, 174, 180, 190, 192, 202, 223, 225, 233, 244, 253, 258-264, 266, 268, 270 ff., 281 neoliberalism-82, 217, 221, 228 f., 233 f. nonhuman perspective 7-19, 27, 51, 53, 55, 63 f., 67, 70, 74, 76, 84, 89 ff., 96 ff., 103, 105, 113 f., 119, 123, 125 f., 128, 136, 142, 146, 159, 162, 165, 174, 176, 181, 189, 195 f., 199 f., 202 f., 208, 211, 217-220, 222, 224, 229, 239 f., 243 f., 258-261, 266, 282-285, 288 ff. nonhuman turn-12, 111 novel 10, 17, 19, 31, 49, 111, 122, 136 f., 140- 147, 149 f., 152, 155, 158 f., 161, 167 ff., 175, 181, 183, 185 f., 244, 278 f. object-oriented ontology-30, 32, 39 f., 51, 259 Oswald, Alice-199, 211, 213 othering-7, 9, 12, 15, 17, 28, 38, 51, 55, 62, 67 f., 73, 76, 78, 111, 115, 117, 126, 137, 173 ff., 177, 179, 182, 195, 197, 199, 205, 207 f., 213, 220, 279, 291 patriarchy-17, 42, 111 f., 114-119, 122, 124 f., 127 f., 130, 135 ff., 140, 143, 148, 151, 175, 186 f. planet-13 f., 16, 29, 31 f., 35 f., 76, 90, 112 f., 118 f., 123 f., 128, 157, 244, 291 plant-10, 12, 14, 18, 74, 90, 100, 111, 123, 142, 166, 227, 277-281, 283-291 trees-37, 40 f., 43, 61, 68-72, 74, 83 f., 111, 118 f., 122 ff., 129, 166 f., 281 plant studies-14, 278 poetry-11 f., 18 f., 49-56, 58 f., 61-64, 67- 71, 75, 79, 83 f., 158, 181, 195, 197 ff., 203, 205, 208, 258, 260 f., 263 ff., 270, 272 post-apocalypse-16, 89, 91, 95, 98, 217, 224 f. posthumanism-9, 12, 14 f., 17, 19, 25-29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39-44, 49-52, 54 ff., 62, 64, 77, 97 f., 118 f., 128, 174-178, 180 f., 185 f., 188, 190, 192, 218, 225, 229, 234, 239, 244, 277 ff., 282, 284, 291 f. precarity-69, 85, 213, 264, 267, 269 Rain World-16, 89, 91-99, 101-105 relationality-8, 18 f., 30, 49, 55, 68, 73 f., 77 f., 81-84, 178, 200, 277, 279 f., 283, 289, 292 responsibility-14 f., 75-78, 115, 170, 198, 210, 220, 281 rhizome-278-282, 285, 287, 291 Rilke, Rainer Maria-199, 205, 207 f. Index 301 Romanticism-12, 15, 19, 40, 55 f., 257 ff., 261-272 Saunders, George-17, 175, 181, 188, 192 science-9, 13, 17, 26, 28 f., 36, 38 ff., 42, 44, 51, 115, 155 f., 166, 195, 202, 204, 224, 239 ff., 253, 258, 260-264, 266, 269-272 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight-16, 67 f., 71 f., 74 f., 79 f., 82 ff. Smith, Charlotte-19, 40, 257, 261, 265 ff., 269 space-14, 25 f., 28, 35, 39 f., 43, 57, 59, 62, 68 ff., 72 f., 76, 80 f., 92, 104, 124, 157, 178, 181, 210, 219, 223, 284, 287 Stray 18, 217-221, 224 f., 227, 229-232, 234 suffering-11, 29, 78, 94, 114 ff., 166, 174, 176, 201 ff., 205, 210, 212 supernatural-14, 17, 136, 155 f., 160, 162, 164 ff., 169, 271 sympoiesis-34, 68, 82 technology-25 f., 28 f., 32-36, 44, 93 ff., 98, 105, 232, 266, 278 The Green Knight-67-76, 78-82, 84 f. thing-10, 30, 32 f., 35, 49, 54 f., 64, 72, 143, 219, 233, 287 f., 290 Thoreau, Henry David-40 time-12, 19, 26, 59, 68-71, 78, 81, 83, 97, 100, 119, 128, 136, 145, 150 f., 162 f., 198, 202, 260, 271 transhumanism-12, 15, 25-29, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41 f., 44, 54, 76, 231, 234 violence-28, 71, 75 f., 118, 126, 128, 135 f., 140, 143, 148-151, 161, 163, 168, 183, 189, 191 f., 202, 210, 213, 234 voice-7, 10, 53, 55, 63, 79 f., 96, 124, 144, 146, 148, 158, 175 f., 189, 197 ff., 205, 208, 219, 227, 231, 285 vulnerability 18, 67 f., 74, 76, 84 f., 111, 116, 168, 200 f., 205, 210, 212, 225 Wolfe, Cary-9, 12, 177 f. Woolf, Virginia-16, 49, 111-124, 126-129 Wordsworth, William-19, 257, 261, 263 f., 267-270 zoopoetics-196 f. 302 Index ISBN 978-3-381-14981-0 Nonhuman perspectives are not uncommon in literature: there have been numerous examples throughout literary history of things, animals, plants, super-, subor posthuman entities with the ability and power to speak, act and think on their own. In the more recent intellectual context of ecocriticism, posthumanism, thing theory, object-oriented ontology, new materialism, critical animal and critical plant studies, nonhuman perspectives have been prominently employed to decenter the human, to stress ecological interdependencies, to challenge anthropocentric perceptions and values or to imagine a posthuman world in which the human perspective is marginalised. This collection of essays sets out to explore nonhuman perspectives in a historically and generically diverse range of case studies, which offer a critical assessment of the potential of nonhuman perspectives to decenter the human, while simultaneously acknowledging and revaluing the apparently inevitable anthropocentrism of human cultural production.