Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub

“It is not so much the absence of itself that is critical, but how it affects what is left and how this may relate to other things.”

It took many generations of human beings to realize that 0 is not nothing. Even today, how many of us really understand that mathematical law beyond accepting it as a universal truth; I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t. I do, however, see its application every day, which makes the idea more accessible. In “Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub,” American neuro-anthropologist Terrence Deacon explores how absence within ordinary life is not nothing. He quotes ancient Chinese sage Lao-tzu, who writes that, “‘use comes from what is not there.’” Lao-tzu is concerned with material goods like cups, wheels, and doors, all of which get their use from the cavity in their design. But beyond use, how else does absence function in our world? Deacon writes that what is truly important about absence is how it relates to things that are in fact there.

In class this quarter, we’ve examined every assigned text through the lens of the Anthropocene, the geological era currently being proposed for Earth. Until rather recently, in both a geologic and human-centric time scale, we could not detect the foundational changes in our planet that define the Anthropocene despite them possibly being present for centuries. The Anthropocene has been absent from humanity’s collective consciousness, but it affects and relates to every life form on Earth. As we’ve read Heart of Darkness, The Hungry Tide, In the Palm of Darkness and other Anthropocentric stories, I’ve come to think of this absence like a ghost: something we cannot see or feel, yet very much a part of our world.

Defining the Anthropocene

“Recent global environmental changes suggest that Earth may have entered a new human-dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene… the evidence suggests that of the various proposed dates two do appear to conform to the criteria to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene: 1610 and 1964.”

As far as I’m concerned, there are two types of ghosts: the good and the bad. The good crossover when they have something to say, when they need to alert the still living of something deeply important. The bad come back to haunt us after they’ve been disrespected in death, which most often means an improper burial. The Anthropocene is, somehow, both kinds of ghosts. Whether the official start date of the Anthropocene is agreed to be 1610 or 1964, the fact remains that humans have been fundamentally changing the planetary make-up of Earth for many years now. You may ask, what does any of this have to do with ghosts? Well, it seems to me that humans have disrespected Earth, and now the environmental ghosts of our actions are coming back to haunt us through devastating wildfires, unprecedented super-storms, and mass extinction. Due to such ecological devastation, many around the world are finally beginning to address what Earth is saying to us. It is clear that we as a species are being haunted, by both a good and bad ghost, and therefore so is our literature.

Conceptually, the Anthropocene has been invisible to our species for most of its existence. Yet, the epoch and all that comes with it impacts even the most microscopic life forms on Earth. If we read literature through the lens of the Anthropocene -- especially books influenced by Heart of Darkness -- we realize that many stories often feature ghosts of their own. Characters, animals, plants, reputations… all of these have the ability to influence a novel without ever taking center stage. Or, perhaps, they take center stage without ever being present.

Heart of Darkness

“The man presented himself as a voice...”

By characterizing the Anthropocene as a ghost, I mean to say that it is a force we cannot register with our unaided human senses, yet we know it is there and we know it has sway in our world. Kurtz, in my eyes, operates throughout Heart of Darkness in this fashion. For the majority of Joseph Conrad’s novella, Kurtz is nothing but a looming presence; he is imprinted on every single page of the book regardless of his actual being in a scene. All Marlow really knows about the man he risks his life to locate is that he is the biggest ivory tradesman in their company, and a controversial one at that. By granting Kurtz the gift of a uniquely powerful voice, Conrad makes him out to be an almost God-like figure. And depending on your faith, God and ghosts can have quite similar attributes. Presenting Kurtz as nothing more than a voice for a large portion of the novel also makes him the spokesperson of his colonialist era in history. Despite being a fictional character, Kurtz has become synonymous with the historical atrocities committed in Africa. As such, his legacy not only haunts Heart of Darkness, but also the world at large.

“To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe. Who paid the expenses of the noble enterprise I don’t know.”

As I mentioned above, European colonialism has had lasting impacts on both the environmental and economic organization of the world despite having “ended” in the mid 1900s. The national greed of early 20th century European nations resulted in the destruction of human life, both then and now. Based on King Leopold of Belgium’s conquest of the Congo, Conrad depicts the horrors of colonialism without sparing any details in his descriptions of its practices. Yet, he does so without emphatic denunciation. Consequently, the ghosts of men like Kurtz still haunt the lands and people they tormented because their own reputations were protected. Conrad writes that he’s unaware of who will be paying the price of this “noble enterprise” -- his euphemism for rape, murder, and immoral environmental violence. Looking at the world today, it’s quite obvious who paid: it’s the countries who still have tumultuous governments, rely on natural resource extraction as their main source of national income, and cater to the economic interests of core nations before their own. I think Conrad knew this himself, but as a product of his time he was unwilling to whole-heartedly condemn the colonizing attitudes of Europe’s most powerful nations. Currently, colonialism’s ghost still lurks, even if the term has fallen out of favor, continuing to haunt familiar grounds.

The Word for World is Forest

“And it seemed to me I had seen you before, perhaps in a dream… Selver is my name. Of the Ash.”

Unlike Kurtz, Selver, the leader of the creechie rebellion against the yumens, is present throughout The Word for World is Forest. Even so, he still acts as a ghost in my eyes. Selver is “of the ash,” which makes me picture him as if he’s come back from the dead. Although he is in fact alive, the arrival of the yumens causes Selver to be reborn from the ashes of his former self. Subsequently, he appears as a God to his own species and often occupies the dreams of the most gifted elders on his planet, cementing himself in their lives before ever meeting them. In The Word for World is Forest, Le Guin equates God to a translator. As a God, or sha’ab in the language of the creechies, Selver translates between his own kind and the yumens as he tries to save his planet from mass deforestation and genocide. I’ve noted above that good ghosts are those who relay messages to the living when they are in peril. Like the Anthropocene signalling that we must change how we live through melting polar ice caps or massive forest fires, Selver “of the ash” translates both his own dreams and those of the elders to warn the creechies of their future if they continue to remain subservient to the yumens. Selver, then, is one of the few good ghosts we come across in this quarter’s readings.

The Hungry Tide

“The speciality of mangroves is that they do not merely recolonize land; they erase time. Every generation creates its own population of ghosts.”

Prior to reading The Hungry Tide, my ghost theory actually had no grounds in the texts we were reading. Characters were often searching for elusive people or animals that I began branding as ghosts, but the term itself had not yet entered our class vocabulary. When I came across this quote describing the often perilous nature of the Sundurbans, nothing seemed more fitting or qualifying to my Anthropocentric ghost story. Not only does Amitav Ghosh mention ghosts, but he does so within the context of colonization and time. If mangroves possess the ability to both colonize the river banks of the Sundurbans and erase time, then there is an environmental absence that pervades Ghosh’s novel. What fills that absence? The stories, memories, and images that stay with the people and animals who knew the land before the mangroves claimed it for themselves.

The mangroves’ erasure of time can also be thought of as a microcosm for the Anthropocene at large. Since the Anthropocene has not yet been officially dated or, for that matter, even named (many authors do not love the term “Anthropocene”), time has great variability within the geological epoch. It matters greatly when the experts decide to date the Anthropocene, either 1610 or 1964, because that date determines what stories we tell about the Anthropocene and what it tells about us. It also determines how much geological time the Anthropocene will be erasing from the Holocene. With the arrival of a new geological epoch, the Holocene will be forced to shed maybe hundreds of years from its history. And while that loss is not all that significant in stratigraphic terms, it is still an erasure of time -- one that Ghosh claims has the power to “create its own population of ghosts.”

“And then suddenly the phantoms came alive again, clawing at her throat and her eyes, attacking her as though she were an enemy who crossed over undetected.”

In the tradition of Joseph Conrad, Ghosh gives the natural world the same level of influence within his literature as humans. However, Ghosh breaks off from Conrad when he does the same for spirits, myths, and Gods. This quote comes when Piya feels as if the crabs Fokir has just cooked for dinner are coming back from the dead to attack her. As a “Heart of Darkness story,” placing The Hungry Tide within the context of colonization is inevitable. India was a colony of England’s for 200 years. Consequently, much of the horror that took place in King Leopold's Congo also occurred in India. Although Piya is not British, she is still the citizen of a nation with its own history of colonization, slavery, and environmental injustice. On Fokir’s boat, it’s almost as if the crabs, sensing her national ties, haunt her for “cross[ing] over undetected” into their land. In Ghosh’s novels, nature has agency. There is a sense that the animals which populate The Hungry Tide have the ability to think and act beyond their instincts. Here, even from the dead, the crabs are choosing to remember the cruelties outsiders brought to India. Ironically, Piya is the character who advocates for the protection of the Sundurban’s wildlife the most, so perhaps the crabs should haunt someone else.

In the Palm of Darkness

“Between 1974 and 1982, the Bufo boreas boreas, better known as the Western toad, disappeared from the Colorado mountains and from almost all its other American habitats.”

Although Mayra Montero’s In the Palm of Darkness is littered with human corpses, bones, and even zombies, the extinctions of frogs around the world is what really caught my attention for this project. Interspersed with the story of Victor and Thierry’s search for the grenouille du sang are real life accounts of frogs that have disappeared, often for unknown reasons, from countries all over the world. I only chose the excerpt detailing the Western toad because it is the first of the series, but Montero includes numerous examples of frog extinctions from Costa Rica to Switzerland. Like our course, which is backgrounded by the spirit of the Anthropocene, Montero frames her novel through the ghosts of these lost frogs. Heart of Darkness, The Hungry Tide, and The Word for World is Forest all feature phantom-esque characters and animals, but none are specifically shaped by a larger ghost story. These amphibian extinctions do nothing to further the plot of Montero’s novel, yet their presence is felt throughout because we as readers can’t help but infer the grenouille du sang to be the next kind of frog to vanish from Earth.

King Leopold’s Ghost

“The beginnings of this story lie far back in time, and its reverberations still sound today.”

The most influential character in the story of our class is one that stayed unknown to humanity for decades to centuries. Although we as a species have been affecting Earth’s atmosphere and geological make-up arguably since 1610, our markings have only recently been discovered and named. Since the effects of the Anthropocene have been present in our planet for so long without us seeing, feeling, or understanding them, I think of this epoch as a ghost haunting us through the various consequences of climate change. And since the Anthropocene is a product of our own creation, it seems to me that we’ve really been haunting ourselves.

One place this Anthropocentric ghost can actually be seen is in Heart of Darkness and the plethora of novels inspired by it. In Heart of Darkness, the ghost of Kurtz haunts both Marlow and the land in Africa he is pillaging. Kurtz only appears in the novel for a few pages, and yet he is the driving force of the story. Inspired by this Conrad, authors like Ursula Le Guin, Amitav Ghosh, and Mayra Montero feature apparitional characters and themes in their own work, causing the ghost of Kurtz, and therefore for the Anthropocene, to “still sound today.” Given that the Anthropocene has just begun on a geological time scale, it’s clear that those sounds will continue to reverberate for millions of years, definitely far beyond the lifespan of our own species. When that is the case, we won’t just be our own ghost anymore… we’ll have the chance to haunt something else.

Notes

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