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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Flower power: Botany, fiction and image-acts

Résumé

This paper proposes to address the agency and the performative role of plants as live beings and as images, using Jocelyn Brooke’s Orchid Trilogy (1948-1950) as a starting point. In this botanical autobiographical record, or “autobotanography” (Garascia 2019), the narrator hunts for rare species of orchids. They were familiar to Brooke, a naturalist who authored The Wild Orchids of Britain (1950). In the first part of the trilogy, The Military Orchid, the source of the narrative drive is located in the sudden and mysterious appearance of the photograph of an orchid. From there, the novel offers a series of sequences where the plants are desired, discovered and admired, as biological entities and/or as images. From the outset, the narrator declares himself to have been “bitten with the Orchid-mania”, thus referring back to the Victorian craze for orchids (Voskuil 2017), and positing the values of rarity and exoticism attributed to those plants in the world of post-war Britain. As markers of queer identity and erotic desire, the orchids often appear to be difficult to identify to the point of misattribution. Their ambiguity also underscores the interplay between the pictorial and the living, as well as between fiction and the natural sciences. This paper explores the premise that the agency of plants may be considered in the same way as that of artefactual images. It examines how the agency of the nonhuman translates in fictional form as an image-act. It also seeks to contextualize the continuing appeal of orchids in fiction and in the natural sciences. Combining the strangeness of non-native plants with the surrealist appeal of the found object, Brooke’s uncanny orchids share the irruptive logic of images. This may be further construed as the afterlife of the surrealist imagery that was naturalized in British Blitz fiction in the 1940s (Mellor 2011). Thus the cultural and pictorial migration of the orchid is considered from the double perspective of ecocriticism and of image anthropology (Belting; Freedberg).
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Dates et versions

hal-04629376 , version 1 (29-06-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04629376 , version 1

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Sophie Aymes-Stokes. Flower power: Botany, fiction and image-acts. L'acte d'image en littérature / The image-act in literature (1880-2020), UCLouvain (Anne Reverseau), Apr 2024, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium. ⟨hal-04629376⟩

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