When ''Historicised Nature'' strikes back : Haunted Eco-Horror in the Anthropocene
Résumé
In his 2017 essay entitled The Progress of This Storm, Swedish social geographer Andreas Malm describes the contemporary climate crisis in the following terms : "The nature that is knocking on the door of the postmodern condition (…) is something of a spectral creature, for it is carried forward by a human past. [M]ore than the revenge of nature, this is the revenge of historicity dressed in nature. The larger the cumulative emissions of CO2, the more uncontrollable the storm; the more society has intruded and intrudes on nature, the more nature invades society with a haunted army whose early incursions are now felt." (77) Two years earlier, Indian novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh reflected on “the freakish events weather of today” with a strikingly similar metaphor : “They are the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms.” (The Great Derangement, 32) Drawing on a range of literary and cinematographic fictions — including Barry Levinson’s The Bay (2012), Samantha Schweblin’s Distancia de Rescate (2014) and Mariana Enríquez “Bajo el agua negra” (2016) — I seek to foreground a mode of ecohorror in which the natural antagonists striking back are explicitly framed as what Malm calls “historicized nature”. I will first argue that these works, which update the gothic motif of haunting through their depictions of nature’s upheavals, unsettle the human/nature dualism. They achieve this not only by staging threats that prove to be natural-cultural hybrids, but also by foregrounding ecological vulnerabilities that cut across species boundaries. In contrast to Simon C. Estok’s contention that ecophobic cultural representations foster hatred and hostility toward nature, I will demonstrate that these works convey both fear of and fear for nature — whereas the insistence on highlighting unequal states of exposure among humans themselves enables them to further shift the traditional battle lines of “man versus nature”.