Although few people
alive today would bat an eye at the notion of willow trees being alive (a
biological fact), their ‘aliveness’ is a source of horror for the narrator of
“The Willows,” and his companion. What makes this vegetable agency horrifying is
its perceived difference from a more familiar animal vitality. In fact, the
entire wetland ecosystem seems alien to the narrator: “a separate little
kingdom” (1), “an alien world” (4), a different planet (16, 17). Consequently,
he struggles to place himself in the landscape except as trespasser, and the
only way he seems to be able to conceptualize the landscape is through
aggressive anthropomorphism and the idealization of nature. But the habit of projecting personified, idealized, or even
rationalistic conceptions of nature onto the environment, which is derived from
the narrator’s self-professed gift of “imagination,” becomes problematic when
it starts obfuscating things as they really are, for example when the narrator
mistakes the body of a drowned man for an otter. Fortunately, the narrator’s
companion, a stoic Swede whom he considers “devoid of imagination” realizes
the mistake (4). When they are stuck on an island with a leaky canoe, the
willows encroaching on them with malicious intent, the Swede warns him: “we
must keep our minds quiet,” (18), “our insignificance perhaps may save us”
(18), and “above all, don’t think, for what you think happens” (19). The Swede
understands that they have to become one with the landscape if they are to escape
from the horror that they seem to have themselves spoken into existence, for “to
name is to reveal […] especially in thought” (19). Blending in with the landscape entails a kind of ‘becoming vegetable’ – it forces them to acknowledge an
aliveness, and a presence that is also mindless. It means adopting a radically
nonhuman way of being.
Le Guin’s story “Vaster
than Empires but More Slow” demonstrates what such an existence might look
like, but instead of imagination the operative theme in the story is empathy.
Among the group of scientist-explorers is Osden. He's an empath, a sensor whose
particular form of autism cannot help but make us think of Greta Thunberg,
another eco-martyr whose autistic superpowers enable her to do what others cannot,
but which also make her an unpalatable figure to some. Similarly, Osden’s cruel
honesty does not win him any friends, but it does allow him to connect with the
planet’s super-organism. Left bleeding to death in the forest after being
attacked by a fellow explorer, their blood and soil mingle, and the planet
finally takes notice of the virus that the humans essentially are to it. Like Osden himself, for whom interaction is traumatizing,
the planet’s acknowledgement of an Other, something rootless and alien, is equally terrifying,
and that fear only breeds more fear. Soon the explorers are caught in a vicious
feedback loop, infected by the planet’s paranoia and sending it back in double
force. In order to heal the wound, and overcome the fear, Osden suggests a kind
of Kierkegaardian leap of faith, presented as a literal leap out of a helijet
into the heart of the forest where he intends to give in to the fear, absorb it,
and thus transcend it: “an unreserved surrender, that left no place for evil”
(132). The
story admits that there is no rational way of understanding this sacrifice but it
seems to suggest that by acknowledging, and accepting fear, we can overcome it.
Denying it, denying that encounters with otherness breed anything but
compassion and harmony, is presented as naïve and potentially fatal.
Laura op de Beke
Works Cited
Blackwood, Algernon. "The Willows." 1907. Find it here.
Le Guin, Ursula K. "Vaster than Empires and More Slow." 1971. Find it here.
