Notes on Vegetal Philosophy and Literature

I.  All Flesh is Grass [Isaiah 40:6]

"Plants", says Randy Laist, "play a vital role in the experience of being human" [9].

It's not just the fact we like to keep a cactus on the kitchen windowsill and utilise plants in an ornamental and symbolic manner; we also consume them, fashion clothes out of them, inhabit structures built with plant materials, and - let's not forget - exploit our green-leaved, photosynthesising friends to manufacture drugs, medicines, and cosmetics.    

Archaeologists might like to speak about the stone age, iron age, and bronze age, but we have always essentially lived in an age (and a world) dominated by plants:  

"Not only has agriculture always been the primary source of bioenergy that has allowed human populations to balloon so prolifically, but the weaving of plants into baskets, the carving of trees into floating vessels, and, possibly, the use of plant-based psychotropic substances to provoke dream-visions have all played a crucial role in the emergence of modern globalized human beings." [9]

Our intimate relationship with plants has also shaped our evolution; the hand - so beloved by Heidegger and which he thinks of as unique to human beings - wouldn't be what it is were it not for the branches and twigs it evolved to grasp and manipulate as tools. It's worth remembering that, according to Genesis, God created plants three days before he bothered to create man and that ultimately all flesh is grass.   


II. On the Defoliation of the Cultural Imagination

Having said all this, ultimately Laist's critical interest is in the long and intimate relationship between plants and literature; a relationship that has been in serious decline for some years now, despite our over-fondness for the prefix eco. Laist notes:

"When one scans contemporary culture for evidence of plant-based narratives [...] the most dramatic meta-phenomenon is the defoliation of the cultural imagination." [My italics, indicating not only that I love this phrase, but that I fully intend to use it henceforth.] [10]

Even as recently as a hundred years ago, writers shared a botanical vocabulary with readers who had a deep familiarity with the appearance and properties of a wide variety of trees and plants. Arguably, that's simply no longer the case. For not only do most readers prefer tarmac and technology to woodland and wilderness, but most authors no longer know the names of the remaining flowers growing by the roadside - and nor does this particularly bother them.     

Laist suggests that the situation is a little different with poetry; that there are still a number of contemporary poets fighting a rearguard action "against encroaching mental defoliation" [11], but I struggle to think of a poet who knows the world of flora in the astonishing and intimate manner that D. H. Lawrence experienced it.

And would any poet today define poetry as Blanchot once defined it: the attempt to protect and preserve in speech a voice in which the silent suffering and joy of flowers might come to expression? I doubt it.   


III. On the Uncanny Ontological Potency of Plants

In his introduction to Plants and Literature (2013), Laist also makes the following interesting point:

"The scarcity of plant-life in the cultural canon of the contemporary West is particularly striking when contrasted against the ubiquity of stories that feature animals [...] Despite the fact that urbanization has taken human beings just as far away from animals as it has taken them from plants, the fewer animals there are in the wild, the more seem to crop up on television [...] and on YouTube." [11]

Not only that, but within academia animal studies has recently developed alongside women's studies, queer studies, and black studies. But as Laist rightly argues:

"Animal studies is essentially an extension of human studies; it is relatively easy to imagine the subjectivity of animals. Animals may be shaped differently than we or pursue a different mode of life, but the basic coordinates of human existence and animal existence are identical in many respects." [11]

Reminding us of Aristotle's extremely influential (but limited) characterisation of plants, Laist continues:

"When it comes to plants [...] we encounter a much more significant barrier to our imagination. Plants seem to inhabit a time-sense, a life-cycle, a desire-structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms." [12]

You might think that Aristotle's positioning of plants at the borderline between inanimate objects and living beings lends them uncanny ontological potency, but it seems that for many writers - primarly concerned as they are with the human, all too human and the personal, all too personal - they're of almost zero interest. 

If I may mention the name of D. H. Lawrence once more, one of the reasons for his greatness - and one of the reasons for my continued fascination with his work - is that he never forgets that human life unfolds within a non-human and inhuman context that is completely depersonalised; a context in which dark pansies and lilies of corruption blossom.

Lawrence understands that the power of plants is not merely symbolic, that they have ontological import all of their own and provide a way of life that is alien, beautiful and soulless; that they challenge our basic assumptions about what it is to be a living thing and our anthropocentric conceit.

The brute force and environmental destructiveness of man may crush many plants or push them into extinction, but, writes Lawrence, the plants will rise again and all our mighty monuments and great cities will not last a moment compared with the daisy.  

See: Randy Laist (ed.), Introduction to Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies, (Rodopi, 2013), pp. 9-17.