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PALGRAVE GOTHIC

Haunted
Nature
Entanglements of the Human
and the Nonhuman

EditedLuke Roberts
by Sladja Blazan
 Palgrave Gothic

Series Editor
Clive Bloom
Middlesex University
London, UK
Dating back to the eighteenth century, the term ‘gothic’ began as a designation
for an artistic movement when British antiquarians became dissatisfied
with the taste for all things Italianate. By the twentieth century, the Gothic
was a worldwide phenomenon influencing global cinema and the emergent
film industries of Japan and Korea. Gothic influences are evident through-
out contemporary culture: in detective fiction, television programmes,
Cosplay events, fashion catwalks, music styles, musical theatre, ghostly
tourism and video games, as well as being constantly reinvented online. It
is no longer an antiquarian pursuit but the longest lasting influence in
popular culture, reworked and re-experienced by each new generation.
This series offers readers the very best in new international research and
scholarship on the historical development, cultural meaning and diversity
of gothic culture. While covering Gothic origins dating back to the eigh-
teenth century, the Palgrave Gothic series also drives exciting new discus-
sions on dystopian, urban and Anthropocene gothic sensibilities emerging
in the twenty-first century. The Gothic shows no sign of obsolescence.

Editorial Advisory Board:

Dr. Ian Conrich, University of Vienna, Austria
Barry Forshaw, author/journalist, UK
Professor Gregg Kucich, University of Notre Dame, USA
Professor Gina Wisker, University of Brighton, UK
Dr. Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, UK
Dr. Alison Peirse, University of Yorkshire, UK
Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Professor William Hughes, University of Macau, China
Dr. Antonio Alcala Gonzalez, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico
Dr. Marius Crișan, West University of Timişoara, Romania
Dr. Manuel Aguirre, independent scholar, Spain

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14698
 Sladja Blazan
Editor

Haunted Nature
Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman
Editor
Sladja Blazan
English and American Studies
University of Würzburg
Würzburg, Germany

ISSN 2634-6214     ISSN 2634-6222 (electronic)

Palgrave Gothic
ISBN 978-3-030-81868-5    ISBN 978-3-030-81869-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2

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 Acknowledgments

This project began before the global pandemic struck, when the threat
of global catastrophic change was all pervading, but still somehow
intangible and indefinite. Something terrible was imminent, but what
form it would take was not yet sure, like a monster that has not yet cho-
sen its earthly form.
To address this urgent, omnipresent yet inexpressible feeling, I assem-
bled a group of theorists and writers to examine ways we might use gothic
and horror to address fears of climate change, environmental collapse, and
related threats. Is this not what the gothic has always expressed so well—
unknowable, inescapable doom?
Now the world has changed. The pandemic is here and the world will
keep changing. I began with a co-editor, whose work in this field was one
of the reasons I was keen to embark on this writing adventure. She got
lost, consumed by forces of the pandemic. So did four other contributors.
It has been a strange and testing journey. If it wasn’t for the many interest-
ing, supportive, intellectually stimulating people travelling with me, it
would have been impossible to persevere.
To begin, I’d like to thank my two anonymous reviewers for supporting
this project and for their helpful suggestions. Lina Aboujieb and Asma
Azeezullah are the most wonderful and supportive editors that have
accompanied the publishing process from beginning to end. Thank you!
The seeds for this topic were sown during a graduate class I taught at
the University of Würzburg in the winter of 2019. I want to thank my
students, whose curiosity and often surprising perspectives keep me not

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

only intellectually engaged, but they give vital meaning to this work. My
students kept reminding me that every little step matters. Thank you for
being who you are!
The next step that mattered in this project was a symposium I orga-
nized at the University of Würzburg in the same winter. I want to thank
all the presenters, some of whom became contributors to this volume. I’d
like to thank Sandy Alexandre, an always engaging intellectual partner,
whose friendship has brought me through many loops, Dawn Keetley for
her thought-provoking new ideas and tireless support, Elizabeth Parker
for pointing out that too much water is used to make films about the
shortage of water, Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet for reminding me that
things are sometimes just the way they seem, Justin D. Edwards, Johan
Höglund, Alexandra Hauke, Catrin Gersdorf, Elisabeth Scherer, Elmar
Schenkel, Annemarie Mönch, and many more. I’d like to thank all of the
participants for the discussions, their questions, and their support and all
of the people at the American Studies department at the University of
Würzburg. And special thanks to Hannah Nelson-Teutsch and Matthew
McGinity for a marvelous poster that will always remind me of how beau-
tiful haunted entanglements can be.
To all the people in my family who endured living with a writer and
editor in lockdown, thank you. I promise to cook something nice
really soon.
Special thanks goes to Eva Hedrich, Rebecca Grözinger, Marie
Beckmann, and Nina Wintermeyer for making sure that there was a forum
for discussion to begin with. Last but not the least, this project would not
have existed without the generous support of the Fritz Thyssen-­
Foundation. I want to thank all involved in making this possible.
 Contents

1 Haunting and Nature: An Introduction  1

Sladja Blazan

2 Microgothic: Microbial Aesthetics of Haunted Nature 21

Davina Höll

3 Black Mold, White Extinction: I Am the Pretty Thing

That Lives in the House, The Haunting of Hill House, “Gray
Matter,” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” 43
Dawn Keetley

4 Vegetomorphism: Exploring the Material Within the

Aesthetics of the EcoGothic in Stranger Things and
Annihilation 67
Sladja Blazan

5 An Ecology of Abject Women: Frontier Gothicism and

Ecofeminism in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived
in the Castle 91
Alexandra Hauke

6 Alligators in the Living Room: Terror and Horror in

the Capitalocene115
Johan Höglund

vii
viii Contents

7 Haunted Technonature: Anthropocene Coloniality in

Ng Yi-Sheng’s Lion City135
Rebecca Duncan

8 Haunted Nature, Haunted Humans: Intelligent Trees,

Gaia, and the Apocalypse Meme159
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

9 The Global Poltergeist: COVID-19 Hauntings181

Simon C. Estok

Index197
 Notes on Contributors

Sladja Blazan is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of

Würzburg. She received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin in 2005.
Recently she completed a manuscript that explores the intersection of spec-
trality and morality under the title Ghosts and Their Hosts: Spectrality in Early
U.S. American Literature and Culture. This publication is currently under
review. Previous publications include American Fictionary: Postsozialistische
Migration in der nordamerikanischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006);
an edited collection with Nigel Hatton, Literature and Refugees (Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann, 2018); with Avital Ronell, What Was I Thinking:
ACriticalAutobiographyandSpectralColloquy(Berlin:Hauptstadtkulturfonds,
2011); and Ghost Stories and Alternative Histories (Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2007). Her areas of research include speculative fiction,
critical posthumanism, critical refugee studies, and migration as a liter-
ary topic.
Rebecca Duncan is Crafoord Foundation postdoctoral researcher at the
Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial
Studies (Sweden). She is the author of South African Gothic (University of
Wales/University of Chicago Press 2018), which was shortlisted for the
2019 Allan Lloyd Smith prize. Her recent work includes articles for
ARIEL and Science Fiction Film and Television and the co-edited projects
Patrick McGrath and his Worlds (Routledge 2020) and “The Body Now”
(2020), a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial
Studies. She has research interests in world literature, political ecology,
speculative fiction, and decolonial thinking.

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Simon C. Estok is a full professor and senior research fellow at

Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea). Estok teaches literary theory,
ecocriticism, and Shakespearean literature. His award-winning book
Ecocriticism and Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia appeared in 2011
(reprinted 2014), and he is co-editor of three books: Landscape, Seascape,
and the Eco-Spatial Imagination (Routledge, 2016), International
Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2013), and East Asian
Ecocriticisms (Macmillan, 2013). His latest book is the much anticipated
The Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge, 2018; reprinted with errata as paper-
back in 2020). Estok has two co-edited collections coming out through
Routledge (Mushroom Clouds: Ecological Approaches to Militarization and
the Environment in East Asia, forthcoming March 2021, and Anthropocene
Ecologies of Food, forthcoming December 2021), and he has published
extensively on ecocriticism and Shakespeare in such journals as PMLA,
Mosaic, Configurations, English Studies in Canada, and others.
Alexandra Hauke is a lecturer in American Studies at the University of
Passau, Germany, where her research and teaching focus on indigenous
studies, folk horror, ecofeminism, digital cultures, and American popular
culture. She has written on law and legal cultures in Native American
detective fiction, American ecofeminist gothic fiction, blackness in horror
film, utopian idealism in dystopian literature, and self-branding on
YouTube and has co-edited essay collections on Native American surviv-
ance, twenty-first-century Canadian literatures and politics, as well as the
post-truth era in the United States.
Johan Höglund is Professor of English at the Department of Languages
and a member of the Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in
Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. His research focuses on the relation-
ship between popular culture, the climate crisis, and Empire as they mani-
fest during different eras and in different media. Johan Höglund is the
author of The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence
(Ashgate, 2014) and editor of Gothic in the Anthropocene (with Justin
D. Edwards and Rune Graulund, University of Minnesota Press, 2021),
Nordic Gothic (Manchester UP, 2021), B-Movie Gothic: International
Perspectives (with Justin D. Edwards, Edinburgh University Press, 2018),
and Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (with Katarina
Gregersdotter and Nicklas Hållén, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). His works
have been published e­ xtensively in journals such as Game Studies, English
Literature in Transition, Continuum, and The European Journal of
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

American Studies. He is working on the monograph Militarizing the

Capitalocene: Militant Futures and the Climate Crisis Narrative.
Davina Höll holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in European and
German Literary Studies from the University of Marburg and a PhD in
American Studies from the University of Mainz. In her PhD Project
“Politics and Poetics of Cholera in nineteenth-century Literature” that
she was researching as a member of the DFG Graduate Program “Life
Sciences – Life Writing” she explored the (im-)possibilities of narrating
traumatic pandemic experience. She is now a post-doctoral researcher at
the Cluster of Excellence “Controlling Microbes to Fight Infections”
(CMFI) at the University of Tübingen, where she works on a project that
investigates the historical, epistemological, and ethical implications of an
anticipated paradigm shift concerning human microbes in the wake of the
antibiotic resistance crisis. Focusing on but not being limited to the field
of Medical Humanities, she is very much interested in how textual and
extra-textual worlds intertwine. She passionately engages in interdisciplin-
ary exchange, for example, while teaching medical students or collaborat-
ing with bio artists.
Dawn Keetley is Professor of English, teaching horror/gothic literature,
film, and television at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Her
works have most recently been published in the Journal of Popular Culture,
Horror Studies, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Journal of Popular
Television, Journal of Film and Video, and Gothic Studies. She is editor of
Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State University Press,
2020) and We’re All Infected: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the
Fate of the Human (McFarland, 2014). She has also co-edited (with
Angela Tenga) Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction
and Film (Palgrave, 2016), (with Matthew Wynn Sivils) The Ecogothic in
Nineteenth-century American Literature (Routledge, 2017), and (with
Elizabeth Erwin) The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The
Walking Dead (McFarland, 2018). Her book, Making a Monster: Jesse
Pomeroy, the Boy Murderer of 1870s Boston, was published by the University
of Massachusetts Press in 2017.
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of English at the University of
Lausanne in Switzerland and head of the American Studies section. Her
areas of specialization are cultural studies, gender and queer theory, and
the emotional and political work of genre (including melodrama, horror,
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

American gothic, and adventure). Soltysik Monnet has a background in

film studies as well as visual culture and literature. In recent years, her
research was focused on the role of genre in the affective and ideological
role of narratives about combat and warfare, and her monograph on the
subject: Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture (Lexington,
2020) has just been published. Her previous publications include a mono-
graph on American gothic in the nineteenth century (2010), an edited
volume on The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture
(2014), and an edited volume on Neoliberal Gothic (2017). A recurring
question that motivates her research is how art, literature, and language
can be used to promote social justice and a more sustainable future.
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Mold and then bubbles spread over Lily’s arms, just as on
the wall 48
Fig. 3.2 The red room overrun with black mold (ep. 10) 49
Fig. 3.3 One of the dead in Haunting, covered, like the walls, with
black mold (ep. 10) 50
Fig. 3.4 The opening panel of “Gray Matter,” juxtaposing a hurricane
and population anxiety 55
Fig. 4.1 A demogorgon surrounded by spores in the Upside Down 72
Fig. 4.2 Will Buyers rotting in the Upside Down with a tendril inside
his body and on his face 74
Fig. 6.1. Dashboard 124
Fig. 6.2. The family home 125
Fig. 6.3. The crawlspace 126
Fig. 6.4. Bannon’s gas station 128
Fig. 6.5. Nature has entered the living room 129
Fig. 8.1 The Happening shows invasive human populations and
pollution, such as these nuclear reactors looming over a
suburban neighborhood. (Screenshot by author) 163
Fig. 8.2 Cover of The End, by Zep (Philippe Chappuis). (With
permission by Rue de Sèvres) 167
Fig. 8.3 The Day After Tomorrow ends with a clear new day, as the US
military rescues survivors, and the protagonists are reunited
for a post-apocalyptic “happy ending.” (Screenshot by author) 174

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Haunting and Nature: An Introduction

Sladja Blazan

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of

recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

In Ted Chiang’s short story “The Great Silence,” a parrot complains

about humans and their desperate search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Busy looking into outer space, they fail to recognize what is right in front
of their eyes. The bird-narrator sighs: “We’re a nonhuman species capable
of communicating with them. Aren’t we exactly what humans are looking
for?” (Chiang 467–8). This rhetorical question is ever more poignant, the
parrot informs us, given the imminent extinction facing its species, for
which humans are to blame. Chiang’s story is representative of a growing
body of work that engages speculative fiction to address questions of the
Anthropocene.1 As the designation for an epoch in which humans became
a significant geological force in heretofore unprecedented ways, the
Anthropocene certainly invites speculation.2 In relation to her own writ-
ing, Margaret Atwood narrowed the definition of speculative fiction down

S. Blazan (*)
English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany
e-mail: sladja.blazan@uni-wuerzburg.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_1
2 S. BLAZAN

to a semi-realistic narrative mode that restricts itself to “things that really

could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors
wrote the books” (6). Similarly, Jewell Gomez writing about her vampire
fiction explains the reason for her preference for this designation: “whether
used in connection with prose or poetry, the term speculative fiction indi-
cates work that postulates a time and circumstance as yet unknown” (949).
This grounding in reality instead of fantasy and futurity instead of the past
gives the speculative mode a particular resonance in the context of envi-
ronmental concerns that can be applied to most genres that this umbrella
term contains: “fantasy, science fiction, and horror, but also their deriva-
tives, hybrids, and cognate genres like the gothic, dystopia, weird fiction,
post-apocalyptic fiction, ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate history,
steampunk, slipstream, magic realism, fractured fairy tales, and more”
(Oziewicz).3 The Anthropocene heralds a time of planetary-scale upheaval
unprecedented in its pace. We live in a world that feels increasingly out of
balance, a shifting of foundation and firmament pervaded by an unrelent-
ing awareness that things will never be the same again. Consequently,
there is a growing cultural interest in “things that could happen” but
“haven’t happened yet,” and many of these possible futures, it seems, are
most readily expressed in the language of horror.4 Mass extinctions and
zoonotic pandemics, crop failures and water shortages, extreme weather
and titanic storms, endless droughts and “megafires,” as well as other
horsemen of the Anthropocene dominate the cycles of news and media. As
Sara L. Crosby expressed it: “Horror is becoming the environmental
norm” (514).
The present collection examines how post-millennial Anglo-American
film and literature engage horror and the more general gothic mode to
address questions of the Anthropocene by focusing particularly on the
entanglements between the human and nonhuman. A distinct turning of
the gaze away from alien worlds, cosmicism, and outer space toward our
own habitats is noticeable in current narratives. Looking inward exposes
gothic and horror landscapes and human uneven entanglements within
those. This book highlights, in particular, the attention given to the pos-
sibility of nonhuman sentience inscribed into these landscapes that are
presented as endowed with intelligence, consciousness, agency, and inten-
tion, a mark of potential for communication and cooperation, as well as
for feeling, needing, and plotting. As demonstrated in the here collected
essays, nonhuman sentience intersecting with humans is often represented
in terms of haunting, which is why special emphasis is placed on ways in
 1 HAUNTING AND NATURE: AN INTRODUCTION 3

which this classic gothic trope came to matter in this moment in time,
stretched at the crossroads of colonization, decolonization, globalization,
capitalism, and climate change.
Given their planetary staging, the forces of the Anthropocene are sel-
dom directly perceptible on a human scale, an intangibility expressed in
such neologisms and new theories as hyperobjects, heliotrope, planetarity,
Gaia, or Great Acceleration versus Slow Violence, to name only a few.5
These new concepts seek to do justice to a globalized world that advances
with—or possibly without—the human in transformative ways that resist
representation. As a mode that has traditionally sought to express what
cannot be rationalized, the gothic mode and the related horror genre are
uniquely positioned to address such unfathomable forces.6 Eugene
Thacker proposed after concluding that “the world is increasingly unthink-
able,” horror needs to “be understood as being about the limits of the
human as it confronts a world that is not just a World, and not just the
Earth, but also a Planet (the world-without-us)” (17). What’s more,
Aspasia Stephanou claimed, “inhuman materiality”—the phrase she uses
to refer to anything indifferent and unreadable to the human—is at the
center of current gothic productions (4). Consequently, the present col-
lection explores this telling intersection of worlding and (gothic) horror
with respect to the concept of “Nature” through the lens of haunting. The
result confirms that no new ghosts or monsters are at the center of our
current struggles with Nature but rather very familiar struggles over race,
class, and gender. All collected essays confirm Sylvia Wynter’s predicament
that future cultural struggles will be geared toward securing a conception
of a self-exclaimed “human” that implies whiteness, masculinity, cis-ness,
and ability, a category of “Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the
human itself,” asserting “the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle”
(9–10). Taking a closer look at how current narratives either confirm or
reject this model of a self-exclaimed “human” in the face of the nonhuman
by offering materialist readings of haunting, the present collection under-
stands itself to be an intervention in problematic conceptualizations of
humanism. Given the growing demand for narratives concerning the
agency of the nonhuman in current film and literature, it is imperative to
analyze this contested ground.
4 S. BLAZAN

Haunting
A tenet of the Anthropocene is the acknowledgment of Nature as an active
agent, the result of a radical rejection of the Enlightenment concept of
agency as an attribute of human intentionality.7 Advocates of the nonhu-
man turn in humanities seek to develop new theories of humans inter-
meshed with nonhuman Nature to express, as Jane Bennett termed it,
“vibrant” and “vital” and as such unpredictable and powerful qualities of
nonhuman materialities. In Bennett’s theory nonhuman Nature has
agency. Haunting can also be understood as an expression of the agency
and vibrancy of Nature. As an active engagement with the past in the pres-
ent, the classic gothic trope of haunting inevitably excavates histories
within Nature, marking the animation or vibrancy in the present by doing
so.8 One of the initial applications of the word haunting is found in early-­
thirteenth-­century Middle English as haunten—a verb to indicate a habit
or recurring practice (“haunt” def. V. 1).9 The etymology from the Old
French hanter with its meaning “to frequent, resort to, to be familiar with,
12. ct.” confirms the context of intimacy (“haunt” def. N. 2). Haunting,
thus, indicates a return, a revisitation; it relates to a spatial and temporal
displacement that does not necessarily rely on the human. What haunted
ecologies such as forests or swamps, thus, can express better than other
concepts is the agency exerted by those places without necessarily engag-
ing the human.
Most dictionaries record the act of habitual return as the defining ele-
ment of haunting. In fact, it is this quality that distinguishes haunting
from the related term, the uncanny. As has been pointed out in numerous
interpretations of Sigmund Freud’s and Ernst Jentsch’s attempts to come
closer to a definition, the uncanny is also a mode that is suspended between
the familiar and the illegible.10 Uncanny, according to Freud’s reading, is
the negation of heimlich, “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar”
(222). In lieu of a dedicated term, unheimlich is inaccurately translated as
the uncanny, but both Germanic words haunt and unheimlich share the
same root with the German word heim and the English word home. They
stem from the English ham—“a village, a town, a collection of dwellings”
(“haunt” def. N.). While uncanny is clearly related to the concept of
haunting, the later departs from the focus on human affect. Freud, in fact,
never really defines the uncanny, in his much-discussed essay with the
same title. Instead, he takes the reader through a list of situations that are
likely to lead to an unsettling irritation, literally translated as not-homely,
 1 HAUNTING AND NATURE: AN INTRODUCTION 5

unheimlich, but also non-native, unheimisch (Freud 220). The uncanny,

thus, in this most famous of all theoretical interpretations, is defined as a
human affect, that which does not belong to home but seems familiar and,
as such, evokes an irritation.11
If uncanny is a negation of home, a haunt is a confirmation of the same.
Haunting emphasizes the return to a familiar place, perhaps home. It
marks a spatial and temporal disjuncture commonly expressed in the act of
trespassing the border between life and death. Rather than a negation,
haunting marks an affirmation, as spaces (including bodies) are haunted
by something that has once existed in the past and returns insistently in
the present; it is a relational mode that connects the past with the present
in filling space with life that insists on existing in spite of death. Haunting
marks bodies (including landscapes) as interactive spaces where death does
not mean decay. It is for this reason that current agents of haunting, our
current ghosts, come to the fore the strongest in so-called natural environ-
ments, as these were often perceived as dead and now seem to come alive
repeatedly in what is presented as revengeful and frightening ways.
Examples analyzed in this collection demonstrate that haunting, com-
monly understood to be the domain of intangible spirits, is in fact often
expressed in very material ways and, thus, resonates with current needs to
understand the agency of materialities. As such, haunting can challenge
normative identities and epistemic authority by exposing material inscrip-
tions of human and nonhuman bodies in their environments and vice
versa. The ghosts that come to the fore in the following chapters, thus,
materialize in the form of microbes, mold, trees, raging oceans, or plant
spores, affirming that, indeed: “Every landscape is haunted by past ways of
life” (Gan et al. G2).
The focus on undead space evoked through haunting can have omi-
nous aspects, but it can also mark a recuperative narrative. The more
recent popularity of representations of haunted forests in popular culture
is also an expression of the current need to redefine natural environments
and build meaningful connections.12 One the one hand, as Yi-fu Tuan and
Elizabeth Parker have demonstrated in their studies of cultural representa-
tions of frightful forests and landscapes: “The Gothic forest […] is an
archetypal site of dread in the collective imagination” (Parker 1). On the
other hand, the recent resurgence of studies about root communication
exemplify that forests are most often understood to be alive in ways that
are yet to be understood.13 While our understanding of Nature is chang-
ing, seen from a New Materialist standpoint, haunting has always
6 S. BLAZAN

recognized the vitality of nonhuman environments and marked them as

sites for communication through mediums. Significantly, even classic
gothic tropes such as haunted houses often point to very specific material
manifestation of nonhuman agency—mold in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The
Shunned House” (1924/1937) or decayed trees in Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). These firmly established images
return with pressing urgency in current narratives that seek to explore the
vitality of materiality, particularly in the context of Nature.
In critical theory and philosophy, haunting has unhinged itself from the
confines of the gothic mode and horror scenarios in response to the pub-
lication of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), in which the concept
of hauntology, a word with phonic similarity to ontology, came to desig-
nate ways in which seemingly overcome and terminated concepts continue
to determine ideologies that replace them.14 Derrida discusses the ways
that the “spectre of Communism,” mentioned by Karl Marx in the open-
ing lines of The Communist Manifesto, would continue to haunt the world
after what Francis Fukuyama in 1992 termed “the End of History.”
Haunting, in this sense, is instrumentalized for its ability to express some-
thing nesting uncomfortably within something else. Currently, our under-
standing of Nature is changing. Theories of the Anthropocene highlight
the necessity of revising the human past as an active agent nesting uncom-
fortably within a larger set of planetary materialities. Seen within this spe-
cific framework, Nature is haunted by humans, which calls for an inspection
of the agents of this haunting, the ghosts, and inquiries into the reasons
for their return. Yet, Nature also haunts humans. Situated often uncom-
fortably within the body of the human in form of microbes, plants, and
animals that we eat, Nature appears within the materialist cosmology of
the body. Pandemics make the consequences of not acknowledging the
human body as an interactive potentially haunted environment painfully
obvious.
It is, thus, not surprising that hauntology found new resonance in the
2010s, particularly through the work of the British writer and critic Mark
Fisher, who expanded the concept of hauntology to a new millennial expe-
rience of future in general. Fisher explains: “What haunts the digital cul-­
de-­sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost
futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate” (16). The cur-
rently omnipresent bleak outlook onto our planetary ecology is causing
personal stress disorders that psychologists begin to treat under names
such as “eco-anxiety” or “ecological trauma,” mainly pointing out that we
 1 HAUNTING AND NATURE: AN INTRODUCTION 7

are missing a language to talk about the fear of looming environmental

disasters (Panu). In this sense, we are haunted by our lost futures. Fiction
writers are facing similar language problems. Looking at the dearth of
published fictional accounts of climate change in 2016 and detailing his
own difficulties when attempting to grapple with the subject, Amitav
Ghosh attributes to our society a “broader imaginative and cultural failure
that lies at the heart of the climate crisis” (17). He further argues that it is
only within the framework of “generic outhouses that were once known
by names such as ‘the Gothic,’ ‘the romance,’ or ‘the melodrama,’ and
have now come to be called ‘fantasy,’ ‘horror,’ and ‘science fiction’” that
writers can find the narrative means to address environmental issues
(Ghosh 43). Reconnecting hauntology to its gothic and horror render-
ings, the present collection accentuates the capacity of these modes to
express the current sense of failure to account for the lost futures on a
seemingly dying planet.

Nature
While gothic and horror fiction addressing issues relating to the current
changing views of Nature is consequently growing in popularity, Ghosh’s
assertion already exemplifies that this development comes with its own set
of problems. As the cultural anthropologist Raymond Williams pointed
out, Nature is one of the most difficult words in the English language to
define (219). Timothy Morton even makes conceptualizations of Nature
responsible for our failure to build “a proper relationship with the earth
and its life-forms” (2). He, thus, calls for a discussion of an “ecology with-
out nature” (Morton 1). In spite of its title, this collection does not depart
from a desire to find new theories and vocabularies to address novel ways
of understanding ecologies. Yet, there is a concomitant need for inquiries
into representations of what is currently called Nature. This is even more
pressing in the wake of a changing understanding of the subject. Instead
of circumventing Nature altogether or offering yet more neologisms, the
articles collected here systematically expose and explore ways in which
more recent examples of Anglo-American film and literature either nest
within normative conceptualizations of Nature or systemically reject them.
Nature with a capital N marks the long and controversial cultural history
of the term and a departure from a static or even definable entity. Nature
certainly, as Morton will have it, “gives us the slip” (2); yet, exploring the
capacity of this concept to provide an excuse for ecological devastation
8 S. BLAZAN

and racial discrimination could lead to the understanding necessary to

circumvent it.
Nature is “directly implicated in the modern world’s” violence and
oppression (Moore 2). The parrot in Chiang’s story already exemplified
how the quest to express the perspective of the nonhuman makes it all too
easy to construct and accept an antagonist, the universal human. Lamenting
what “humans” have done to its species, the parrot confirms a collective
responsibility. Yet, as Sylvia Wynter has demonstrated most succinctly, far
from universal, the concept “human” enables instead “a present ethno-
class Man’s overrepresentation […] as if it were that of human itself,” and
as such it impedes “any present struggles with respect to race, class, gen-
der, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global
warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of
earthly resources” (260). In other words, lamenting the role of “the
human” in current extinction narratives paradoxically strengthens the nor-
mative authority that has led to a species’ demise to begin with. It is,
therefore, now, in the historical moment of time when, as Ursula K. Heise
has pointed out, “the cultural meme of the end of nature” dominates dis-
cussions about the Anthropocene that a fine-tuning of the discourse
around the role of the human in present ecosystems and the agenda set-
ting around Nature as its nonhuman Other appear to be more important
than ever (8). The complexity of the question—who and what gets to be
called human with respect to the nonhuman—is reflected in the present
collection, which, in its analysis of cinematic and literary representations of
sentient Nature within the traditional gothic trope of haunting, brings
together history, race, postcolonialism, and feminism with ecocriticism
and media studies.
Activating the past in the present in terms of haunting exposes the
underlying racial dimension always at work in modernist conceptualiza-
tions of identity models. The present collection thus connects a traditional
gothic trope—haunting—with current representations of ecosystems and
nonhuman environments and their capitalist and industrial origins that
contribute to what came to be known as Nature. To scrutinize Nature
inevitably means to scrutinize stories of racial oppression, segregation, and
exploitation. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, in fact,
locates the invention of race in hostile Nature.

At any rate, races in this sense were found only in regions where nature was
particularly hostile. What made them [savages] different from other human
 1 HAUNTING AND NATURE: AN INTRODUCTION 9

beings was not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like
a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, […].
They were, as it were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically
human character, the specifically human reality, so that when European men
massacred them, they somehow were not aware that they had committed
murder. (Arendt 1962)

Arendt’s telling extrapolation exemplifies not only the exclusion of certain

humans from humanity by way of Nature, it also demonstrates that Nature
has always also been a justification for pillaging, destruction, and depreda-
tion of the nonhuman and all those not recognized as human. The authors
in this collection, thus, seek to expose ways in which Ecogothic tropes
encode what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson called “the resounding silence in the
posthumanist, object-oriented, and new materialist literatures with respect
to race” (216). Extending New Materialism to the intersection of Nature
and haunting demonstrates that a reordering of temporality and spatiality
in the movement “beyond” (human and life) exposes both, bodies that are
occluded through the concept of Nature and an intrinsic interlocking of
all materialities. Haunting, with its capacity to animate, opens fundamen-
tal questions relating to erased histories and voices buried in the debris of
the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene and the Ecogothic

Haunted Nature follows an emerging impulse to search for the possibility
of communion with the natural world—to answer the question posed by
Chiang’s parrot—by expanding the scope to plants, fungi, and microbes.
While most cultures can draw on rich cultural traditions of human-animal
communication and transmutation (therianthropy), the same cannot be
said for human-plant interaction. Even the sciences seem to have priori-
tized the animal over the plant, a documented prejudice that has been
termed “taxonomic chauvinism” (Bonnet et al.), “zoo-centrism” (Vilkka),
or “plant blindness” (Wandersee and Schussler). In recognition of this
historical bias, scholars and writers have recently been growing more
expansive in their approach to the scope of human-nonhuman interactions
to include the world of plants. Recent academic works attest to a growing
interest in plant sentience, such as Communication in Plants (2006),
Plant-Thinking (2013), or Thus Spoke the Plant (2018). Books like Peter
Wohlleben’s Das geheime Leben der Bäume (2015, translated from German
10 S. BLAZAN

as The Hidden Life of Trees) and Francis Hallé’s earlier Éloge de la Plante
(1999, translated from French as In Praise of Plants) have popularized the
idea of plant intelligence among a non-academic audience. These publica-
tions promote a philosophical position that attests not only to a new sen-
sibility in culture and critical theory to the sentience of nonhuman life but
also to a shift away from placing the human at the center of all things. It,
thus, does not come as a surprise that there is a growing interest in current
film and literature to express nonhuman sentience within gothic and hor-
ror frameworks.
Crossing the relatively new academic fields of Ecocriticism and New
Materialism with the framework of the traditional gothic trope of haunt-
ing locates our inquiries within the Ecogothic. In a special issue of the
journal Gothic Studies, David Del Principe defines the “EcoGothic” as a
“new critical field that merges the ecocritical and the Gothic towards a
more inclusive, non-anthropocentric understanding of monstrosity and
fear” (1). Smith and Hughes define the Ecogothic in their introduction to
a volume with the same title, in terms of “how the body as a site of Gothic
fear—sexual, injured, dismembered and celebrated—can be seen and posi-
tively re-membered in a literary landscape” (8). The material is central to
both of these definitions. Focusing on the material within the Ecogothic
has the capacity to criticize the disembodied, rational subject encoded in
conceptualizations of the (hu)Man and to offer alternative depictions of
entanglement in the physical world. Drawing from a long tradition that
transitions from the turn of the nineteenth-century gothic tropes as estab-
lished most succinctly with the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) and the inscription of horror onto the material body, the Ecogothic
in twenty-first-century narratives includes the potential to circumvent uni-
versalist modes of thinking about humans as a species. Emerging out of
the Enlightenment ideal of reason and control, the gothic tradition in lit-
erature and culture has a long history of exposing eruptive and uncontrol-
lable forces guiding human actions seeking to both question and affirm
imperialist frameworks. In Anglo-American twenty-first-century film and
literature that engage conceptualizations of Nature, traditional gothic
tropes are, thus, yet again in demand for their long history of depicting
bodies as a site of transformation and negotiation. Furthermore, the
repeated focus of narratives of ecological devastation and the ensuing
human transformation on dissolving, fragmentation, and disintegration
finds a correlation in the dominant “negative aesthetics” of the more tra-
ditional gothic (Botting 1).15 As an already existing and helpful framework,
 1 HAUNTING AND NATURE: AN INTRODUCTION 11

the gothic is, thus, used and abused in more recent narratives, as it can be
not only advantageous but also detrimental to promoting a more just
inscription of humans in the web of life. This makes analyzing new
Ecogothic narratives imperative. To put it in Donna Haraway’s terms: “It
matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts” (160).
Here presented theoretical renderings of haunting and haunted natural
environments situate their arguments within a Capitalocene (Moore
2016) and Chthulucene (Haraway 2015) as well as within the Anthropocene
(Steffen et al. 2011). All three designations are applied in non-mutually
exclusive ways, as they are all understood to serve the purpose of address-
ing the same cause—a search for narratives to capture the imbalanced
entanglement of human and nonhuman lives in insightful ways.16 The
Anthropocene fails to adequately account for power relations, since all
humans are implicated under the designation “anthropos.” Arguments
that highlight the disproportionate ways in which the current climate
change affects the more affluent Global North in comparison to the Global
South align themselves with Moore’s theory of the Capitalocene and “a
political economy, which rests upon an audacious accumulation strategy:
Cheap nature” (Moore 2). However, the ever-growing popularity of apoc-
alyptic scenarios that revolve around the perspective of human survival in
the face of planetary disaster is better understood within the Anthropocene,
for the ability of the concept to address more general but fundamental
problems of our times, such as how exactly did certain communities
change planetary life? Whereas a specific inquiry into ways in which human
activity inscribes itself into the earth as material and particularly narratives
that seek to counter the indefensible capitalist extraction of earthly
resources with images of chthonic intelligence are better situated within
the Chthulucene (Haraway).17 In the variety of human entanglements
with nonhuman material, the individual chapters demonstrate that Nature
refers to various forms of materiality, from images of mold that appears
“after the humans have left” (Keetley), to robo-fauna and engineered nat-
ural environments produced within multi-billion-dollar projects of terra-
formed land (Duncan), to nonhuman animals that human animals eat
(Estok). The ambiguity of the term Nature is, thus, at least partially
reflected in the individual chapters.
12 S. BLAZAN

Trajectory
We begin with what one of the main founders of modern bacteriology,
Robert Koch (1843–1910), deemed to be the smallest and yet most dan-
gerous enemies of humankind—microbes. Tracing the long history of
antagonism between human and microbe into the twenty-first century,
Davina Höll proposes a theory of the microgothic. In her analysis, telling
correlations between cultural responses to early theories of microbes
established in the early nineteenth century and more recent debates con-
cerning the same issues reveal a “persistence of the microgothic.” Both
periods situate the potential pathogenicity of microorganisms and the
thereof resulting death of the human body as a haunting presence in mod-
ern societies. What this continuity reveals is an enduring and insistent dis-
connect between cultural images of the human body in Anglo-American
literature and the body’s own elemental material, which, in turn, stands in
the way of renegotiating Nature as an inclusive rather than an exclusive
environment. This tradition, as Höll argues, continues to persist in spite of
new awareness of the permeability of the human body to its environment,
as she demonstrates in her microgothic interpretation of current body art.
Dawn Keetley’s chapter explores mold, a little-recognized though per-
vasive substance throughout gothic and horror literature and film, and
highlights its connection to racialized narratives of species extinction. As a
cultural representation of dead matter, mold is a materialist form of haunt-
ing. Keetley’s reading of “weird incarnations of human afterlives,” as spe-
cifically manifested in a speeding fungus that spreads after death, leads to
her theory of “mycelial haunting,” which is reflected in narratives that take
a step beyond individual death toward species death in an increasingly
warming world. Yet, taking a closer look at horror narratives such as the
Osgood Perkins’ film I am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016),
Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (2018),
the segment “Gray Matter” in Creepshow (2019), and H. P. Lovecraft’s
“The Shunned House” (1924) reveals that human extinction in the ana-
lyzed narratives is, in fact, code for white extinction. Species haunting
reveals itself as a haunting of exclusively white bodies. Finally, tracing the
appearance of mold reveals the presence of race as a haunting subtext that
has often been occluded in film and fiction about global warming and
overpopulation.
Microbial and mycelial hauntings prefer dark and musty environments.
These are the topic of the next chapter. Sladja Blazan explores haunted
 1 HAUNTING AND NATURE: AN INTRODUCTION 13

underground ecologies by demonstrating how ecohorror narratives that

focus on monstrous chthonic intelligence reinscribe human bodies into
earthly materialities. While both the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–)
and Jeff VanderMeer’s first part of The Southern Reach trilogy, titled
Annihilation (2014), remain strongly influenced by the Lovecraftian con-
cept of “cosmic dread” (Lovecraft 139), these more recent popular narra-
tives mark significant departures from the genre-typical “cosmic
outsidedness” (Joshi 1501). In contrast to narratives in which the nonhu-
man is illegible to the human, these narratives put the human interlocutor
in conversation with earthly matter(s) and revise figurations of ecologies
out of which a certain type of population has extrapolated themselves in
stories they tell each other. This form of environmental assimilation within
haunted ecologies where dead matter is alive stands in a long tradition of
North American Indigenous storytelling. In this way, Indigenous cosmol-
ogies mediated through popular culture and presented within appropri-
ated frameworks come to the fore in debased ways in a time that seeks to
fill the void that a severing of human bodies from nonhuman environ-
ments has left gaping like a wound in the mental make-up of modern
huMan-ity.
Alexandra Hauke’s chapter presents ecofeminism as a corrective and
curative approach intended to break down binaries between human/
Nature and Nature/culture that continue to haunt ever-new generations
due to their inscription in the long tradition of the Frontier Gothic. In her
reading of Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novella We Have Always Lived in the
Castle, and particularly its connection to the 2018 film adaptation of the
text, Hauke traces the bridge between “gothic pasts” and their “present
specters” thematizing the haunting qualities of frontier violence against
women. In her interpretation, both film and novella comment on the
colonial legacies of the frontier as source of intersectional violence located
at the point where women’s bodies merge with landscapes. The topicality
of gothic horrors in the current “culture of fear” that she sees exemplified
in Donald Trump’s presidency is here traced back to its roots in the “fron-
tier paradigm” and the “origin myth” of “White Americans.”
The collection moves on to planetary haunting. Environmental disas-
ters such as floods are an increasingly popular topic in gothic and horror
fiction and cinema. Resonating with Rob Nixon’s study Slow Violence and
the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Johan Höglund’s chapter delin-
eates the stark disparity with which natural disasters affect privileged peo-
ple in the Global North and poor communities in the Global South.
14 S. BLAZAN

Employing the classic gothic distinction between terror and horror intro-
duced by one of the first gothic novel writers, Ann Radcliffe, Höglund
draws the dividing line between the experience of immanent horror on the
side of disadvantaged communities and the haunting terror experienced
on the affluent side. Gothic and horror, Höglund argues, are current cen-
tral affective modes that disrupt this antagonism by promoting an under-
standing of the Capitalocene as ultimately affecting all social strata,
whereby all humans are inevitably situated in and haunted by Nature.
From narratives that employ images of natural disasters to convey a
depiction of the human as immanently entangled with Nature, Rebecca
Duncan turns the discussion to artificially generated human-nature assem-
blages. In her reading of futuristic visions of eco-modernist cities, exem-
plified most aptly by Singapore as a model for Anthropocene survival,
Duncan, like the authors of the previous chapters, challenges the category
of collective humanity on which the Anthropocene hinges. Her reading of
the environmental history of race and gender in technonature traces how
tropes of haunting are mobilized in cultural productions from the Global
South both to question and reimagine extractivist and exploitative capital-
ist relations. In this chapter analyzed speculative tales from Ng Yi-Sheng’s
Lion City (2018) exemplify the ability of current narratives to enact a form
of haunting in respect to both technonature, and more widely, to the
Anthropocene’s account of crisis. Fixing problems of the Anthropocene
through terraforming and climate calibration is exposed as a seductive
doxa that effectively occludes systemic exploitation of human and nonhu-
man resources.
The current fascination with end-of-the-world scenarios in Anglo-­
American film and literature and, more specifically, post-end-of-the-world
stories is overwhelming. In her contribution to this volume, Agnieszka
Soltysik Monnet takes a closer look at a specific subset of apocalyptic nar-
ratives by defining what she terms “the apocalyptic Ecogothic.” Two
examples of narratives that imagine a global holocaust engineered by
trees—the 2008 film The Happening and the graphic novel The End
(2018)—exemplify ecohorror narratives that work with the premise that
trees are intelligent and therefore plot to remove humans from the planet.
This horror scenario, in which trees are the perpetrators, centers around
both representations of haunted Nature in the “apocalyptic Ecogothic”
and ways in which post-apocalyptic scenarios currently haunt ecological
narratives, demonstrating that the real challenge humanity is currently fac-
ing is not the end of the world but rather failing to imagine alternative
scenarios based on justice and sustainability.
 1 HAUNTING AND NATURE: AN INTRODUCTION 15

Gothic and horror have always shown a fascination with contagious ill-
nesses. From The Last Man by Mary Shelley (1826), I am Legend by
Richard Matheson (1954), to Sleep Donation by Karen Russell (2014),
pandemic narratives have used the mode of haunting to address the inva-
sive return of what was believed to have died out. And yet, one of the
revealing omissions, both from fictional and actual accounts of plagues
and pandemics, is the centrality of animals to the pathogenic origins and
the propagation of disease. The plague bacillus, like a revenant, keeps
coming back even when believed to be dead. It returns to home, the
human body. It haunts. In place of a summary, Simon Estok’s chapter
marks this as the return of a global poltergeist, which is haunting current
humanity for its ignorance of other-­than-­human materialities and their
agencies in our everyday lives. In his exposure of striking parallels between
images repeatedly used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and
descriptions in Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), it becomes obvious
that transfer of genetic material among species will most likely remain at
the center of gothic and horror narratives to come. Yet, the centrality of
the topic is also an opportunity to acknowledge the effects of human
entanglements with nonhuman actors and to expose our destructive sense
of exceptionalism in all its variations.
In a time when we are coming to an understanding that life itself as a
category is proving to be difficult to define (Thacker 2010), inspecting
whose lives matter and who and what is always already marked as dead
while alive becomes imperative. Here collected essays, thus, interrogate
our understandings of both the haunting and haunted materialities that we
came to call Nature in current cinematic and literary reconfigurations.
This is only a miniature step in the midst of the Anthropocene that is a
Capitalocene that is a Plantationocene that is a Chthulucene, but unlearn-
ing the common frame of reference can make space for meaningful and
more just communities and communication with transformative capacity.
These are important because right now, as Joy Harjo expressed it most
vividly: “We make a jumble of stories. We do not dream together” (101).

Notes
1. The umbrella term speculative fiction came to include “diverse forms of
non-mimetic fiction operating across different media” including “fantasy,
science fiction, and horror, but also their derivatives, hybrids, and cognate
genres like the gothic, dystopia, weird fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction,
16 S. BLAZAN

ghost stories, superhero tales, alternate history, steampunk, slipstream,

magic realism, fractured fairy tales, and more” (Oziewicz).
2. The term Anthropocene was first defined in Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene
F. Stoermer in 2000 (17–18). It was coined to mark the geological epoch
within which accelerated anthropogenic activities over the past 200 years
have become a force of nature themselves. See also Zalasiewicz.
3. Speculative fiction, of course, does not depend on realistic conventions.
On the contrary, Sami Schalk, for example, praises speculative fiction for
the possibility to experiment with non-realist conventions to “imagine oth-
erwise” disability, race, and gender (3).
4. In “New Empiricisms in the Anthropocene: Thinking with Speculative
Fiction About Science and Social Inquiry” Elizabeth de Freitas and Sarah
E. Truman explore the narrative means of speculative fiction “to help us
rethink empiricism in posthuman ecologies of the Anthropocene” high-
lighting the ability to “open up scientific imaginaries.”
5. Timothy Morton introduced hyperobjects to provide a term that can
address “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to
humans” (2013, 1), of which climate change is one example; heliotrope is
the designation proposed by DeLoughrey “to address sun and radiation as
an invisible yet permeable sign of the Anthropocene” (26).
6. Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland, or the Transformation (1798) immediately come to mind as early
examples of gothic novels that focus on mysterious forces envisioned as
diseases with lethal consequences.
7. In “The concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency in
the Land,” Val Plumwood, for example, writes about the necessity to
acknowledge “nature as a field of agency” (115).
8. Andrew Smith and William Hughes’ 2013 seminal collection Ecogothic is
the first to define the term, followed by a special issue of the journal Gothic
Studies edited by David Del Principe in 2014 with the title The EcoGothic
in the Long Nineteenth Century. With its focus on American wilderness and
racial Otherness, Dawn Keetley and Mathew Wynn Sivils’ edited collection
Ecogothic in Nineteenth Century American Literature published in 2017
offers an important contribution to the emerging field of the Ecogothic.
9. This reference and all further references are taken from the online Oxford
English Dictionary accessed on March 2, 2019.
10. In 1919 Sigmund Freud published a much-discussed essay entitled “Das
Unheimliche” (translated by James Strachey as “The Uncanny”), in which
he extrapolates from Ernst Jentsch’s previously published theory.
11. Nicholas Royle in his seminal study of the uncanny also highlights the
“peculiar commingling of the familiar and the unfamiliar” in relation to the
one who is registering unsettling feelings (1).
 1 HAUNTING AND NATURE: AN INTRODUCTION 17

12. For example, The Mist (2016), Bird Box (2018), and The Rain (2020), to
name only a few.
13. Suzanne Simard introduced the term “forest wisdom” to describe the elab-
orate arborial system in the forest that she compares to neural networks in
human brains.
14. The term hauntology was first coined in Derrida’s lectures at the sympo-
sium “Whither Marxism” at UC Riverside in 1993.
15. In his introduction to Gothic Fred Botting opens his study with the state-
ment: “A negative aesthetics informs gothic texts” (Botting 1).
16. In “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making
Kin,” Donna Haraway asks the important question: “[W]hen do changes
in degrees become changes in kind” (159) and comes to the conclusion
that more than one name is warranted to address current environmen-
tal issues.
17. Derived from the word “chthonic” in the meaning of “subterranean,”
Donna Haraway coined the term Chthulucene to contest the focus on the
human within the concept of the Anthropocene.

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 CHAPTER 2

Microgothic: Microbial Aesthetics

of Haunted Nature

Davina Höll

The Origins of the Microgothic

Microbes are the smallest units of organic life. The imagination of a micro-­
life that exists beneath the sphere of human, animal, and plant has always
been present in human reason (Nicolson 169). As a strong symbol for the
intricacies of terrestrial and even extraterrestrial living beings as well as for
life itself, microbes often stand in for the notion of a haunting as well as
haunted nature. The development of optical devices, such as the micro-
scope, only made visible what was already present in the people’s imagi-
nary worlds (Drews 3). In the 1670s, the Dutch cloth merchant Antonie

The research of this paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

(DFG, German Research Foundation) graduate school 2015 “Life Sciences –
Life Writing” at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and by the DFG
Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2124 “Controlling Microbes To Fight
Infections” (CMFI) at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

D. Höll (*)
Institute for Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Tübingen,
Tübingen, Germany
e-mail: davina.hoell@uni-tuebingen.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2021
S. Blazan (ed.), Haunted Nature, Palgrave Gothic,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81869-2_2
22 D. HÖLL

van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) discovered “animalcules,” tiny little ‘ani-

mals’ that only became visible to the human eye at a hundredfold magni-
fication. The first news of the existence of microorganisms, invisible to the
naked eye, provoked a highly ambivalent debate that was spurred by fasci-
nation and admiration on the one hand as well as by disbelief and repulse,
ridicule, or scientific pessimism on the other (Nicolson 167–72; Košenina).
Until today, the invisible life of microbes evokes the double bind of fasci-
nation and horror.
Years before the discovery of microorganisms, the English philosopher
Francis Bacon (1561–1662) had already attributed epistemological value
to all “mean and even filthy things” (Bacon 296). In his Novum organon
scientiarium, published in 1620, Bacon vouched for making these ‘mean
and filthy things’ the object of scientific investigation, “for whatever
deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of
existence; and things mean and splendid exist alike” (Bacon 296). The
first pictorial representations of microscopic objects that the English scien-
tist Robert Hooke (1635–1703) published in his Micrographia in 1665
followed Bacon’s lead. The accurate as well as aesthetic etchings of miner-
als, parts of plants, or insects strongly influenced the perception and largely
shaped the imaginations of the first microscopic investigations. They
showed a minute delicacy, symmetry, and regularity of, for example, a fly’s
wing or of urinary gravel that the macro forms of the microscopic objects
often lacked. In 1743, British naturalist Henry Baker (1698–1774) stated
in his popular standard work on microscopy, The Microscope made Easy,
that the microscopic view of nature revealed “nothing […] but beauty and
perfection” (Baker 297). Baker assured that it is the perfection of divine
creation that unveils under the microscope. But, according to Baker, the
microscope did not only praise divine perfection. It also demonstrated the
imperfection of man-made creation, which the irregularity, coarseness,
and asymmetry of any pencil or brush stroke proved when viewed under
the microscope (292).
In addition to optimistic views on the new technology, the optical revo-
lution of the microscope also provoked highly critical reactions. For some,
it seemed that not only the imperfection of human creativity but the
imperfection of man himself was negotiated. The invention of the tele-
scope had already fundamentally challenged the position of man within
the natural order. The precariousness of the infinite vastness of space in the
telescopic vision was now mirrored in the precariousness of the abyssal
depth the microscopic view opened (Lightman 47). In addition to these
 2 MICROGOTHIC: MICROBIAL AESTHETICS OF HAUNTED NATURE 23

ontological problems, even the solid materiality of the ‘closed’ human

body became threatened. Already Leeuwenhoek had discovered that the
human body was shared with ‘little animals’ that, for example, inhabited
the human mouth (O’Malley 36). And when the microscope was directed
at the human skin, it showed that the supposed borderlines of the human
body were by no means as clearly demarcated as they might seem. The
apparently smooth and mostly even outlines of the human frame dissolved
into endless cratered landscapes when approached with the microscopic
gaze. The observation that the human body seemed to be rather fluidly
bounded and in this permeability not exclusive to human beings was as
unbelievable as much as it was undesirable. The application of the magnifi-
cently magnifying instrument, thus, not only opened up new worlds of
vision and knowledge, but it also evoked deep skepticism and outright
rejection. Herman Melville exemplarily shows this in his novel Mardi and
a Voyage thither (1849), when one of his protagonists states: “The micro-
scope disgusts us” (Melville 381).
From the beginning, the epistemological as well as the aesthetical val-
ues of objects magnified by the microscopic gaze were perceived highly
ambiguously. Especially Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microbes was fre-
quently described with attributes of the fantastic and the miraculous and
the latter itself ridiculed as “fantastic who pronounced absurdities”
(Nicolson 169). For a long time in scientific, social, and aesthetic dis-
course, the minute life forms to whom, no definite ontological nor mor-
phological status could be ascribed, because of the lack of knowledge and
magnification power, oscillated between “fairy” and “monster.” Laura
Forsberg and Bernard Lightman, for example, attest the first half of the
nineteenth century a thoroughly positive occupation with these fantastic
microbes (Forsberg; Lightman; Keene; Seibold-Bultmann). Forsberg
points out that in Great Britain there existed a surprising imaginative rela-
tionship between microscopical objects and the notion of fairies (Forsberg
639). In contrast, Lightman cites the representation of the microscopic
world as the “work of some mighty genius of Oriental fable” (Lightman
46), which was postulated above all by numerous popular scientists in
their works aimed primarily at a lay audience, but which also determined
scientific discourses (Seibold-Bultmann). Martina King has also pointed to
the aesthetic potential of microbes that were artistically explored around
1900, for example, in the Art Nouveau movement (King 106). But besides
this “enchanting effect” (Forsberg 642) of microscopic discoveries, there
persisted a dark, a gothic side to the notion of the world hitherto invisible.
24 D. HÖLL

Already in 1838, the famous German microbiologist Christian Gottfried

Ehrenberg (1775–1876) stated in his treaty on microorganisms Die
Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen that realm of the micro-
cosm since its discovery has been depicted as a “monstrous ghost world”
(Ehrenberg V).1 The microbe as an uncanny other that transgressed the
limits of the body, knowledge, and even the imagination thus found its
analogy in the notion of a monstrous apparition, a ghost.2 Thus, from the
beginning, the microbial imagination was what I call a microgothic one.
In the decades and centuries that followed the revelation of the invisible
microworld, the idea of ghostly, monstrous microbes became extremely
powerful. The notion of monsters and ghosts as the personified disturbing
other, capable of violating the limits and integrity of the human body, was
deeply rooted in nineteenth century’s collective consciousness and public
discourse (Böhm and Sproll 37). When microbiologist pioneers such as
Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and Robert Koch (1843–1910) provided evi-
dence for potential pathogenicity of microorganisms, the early established
uncanny relation between microbes and harm was significantly reinforced.
They showed that microorganisms were the cause of numerous major dis-
eases at the time, such as anthrax, cholera, or tuberculosis. In the 1880s,
Robert Koch’s research incorporated the knowledge about the danger of
microbes as pathogens into the concept of modern bacteriology stating
that microbes were the “smallest but most dangerous enemies of human-
kind” (Koch 660). In the popular imagination as well as (popular) scien-
tific discourse, the ghostly microbes have become pathogenic foreign
bodies (Hänseler 29), which invade the body as the inhuman other to
damage and ultimately conquer it. Thus, by the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury, despite the increase in bacteriological knowledge, the uncanny
microbes had lost nothing of their threatening nature.

“All monstrous, all prodigious things”: William

Heath’s “Monster Soup”
The imagination of the microbes as a spectral hazard from a non-human
outside that imperils the human inside has not only decisively influenced
public discourse, it has also found its way into art and literature. Maybe
the earliest pictorial depiction of ghostly microbes is the colored engraving
created by the London caricaturist William Heath (1794/1795–1840) in
 2 MICROGOTHIC: MICROBIAL AESTHETICS OF HAUNTED NATURE 25

1828. I argue, the picture that bears the significant title “Monster Soup”
became an icon of the microgothic.

William Heath, Monster Soup, colored engraving, 1828

Around 1830, Heath was a leading London caricaturist (Heneage), but

today he is widely underappreciated and hardly known (Mellby). However,
his colored engraving became very influential, especially in connection
with the depiction of cholera. Cholera was one of the major pandemic
threats that ravaged the entire nineteenth century, although the first out-
break of the disease on the British Isles was yet to occur when the picture
was published in 1828. It is one of the first graphic testimonies to refer to
the connection between polluted water and the danger it poses to the
health of its consumers. In doing so, it is an impressive example of the
seismographic and even anticipatory potential of art and culture (Smeele
17) that lastingly shaped the imaginative and imaginary worlds of the
nineteenth century and beyond.
Heath’s caricature consisting of a double frame that shows a lady drop-
ping her teacup in disgust while her other hand holds on to what seems to
be the tube of a microscope yet at the same time bears significant resem-
blance to the eyepiece of a telescope. The setting refers to the context of
26 D. HÖLL

microscopy, thus also evokes its contemporary parallelism of microscopy

and telescopy as the new media for making the invisible visible, both of
which have fundamentally shaken the human self-image in the order of
things. A round section directly attached to the tube, which has been part
of the fixed sign repertoire of microscopy since the publication of Robert
Hooke’s Micrographia, visualizes what the view through the ocular reveals.
The detail shows the content of her beverage, namely, as the bottom title
reads: “Microcosm. dedicated to the London Water Companies. 1.
Brought forth all monstrous, all prodigious things, 2. hydras, and gor-
gans, and chimeras dire. (vide Milton).” Within the same frame, above the
picture, the following is specified: “Monster Soup commonly called
Thames Water being a correct representation of that precious stuff done
out to us!!!” Following the intermedial invitation “vide Milton,” meaning
“see Milton,” the viewer is drawn into the hellish world of the second
book of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Here, Satan, after falling into
hell, makes his way to the world of mankind to corrupt it. But before he
overcomes the gate of hell and the intermediate realm to earth with the
help of the guardian figures of sin, death, and chaos, he roams about the
expanses of hell itself,

Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,

Perverts, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, unutterable, and worse
Then Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d,
Gorgons and Hydra’s, and Chimera’s dire. (Milton B.II, v. 624–28)

Heath thus equated the haunted nature of the Thames’ water, which at
the beginning of the nineteenth century was distributed to the population
as drinking water by most of London’s water supply companies with the
hostile habitat of the underworld. Here, all life dies but death lives and
nature produces things that are so repulsive and unspeakable that they
could hitherto not even have been imagined. A stronger counterargument
to the often-postulated thesis of an “enchantment” of the microscopy dis-
course in the nineteenth century as mentioned beforehand seems hardly
possible. Since the early nineteenth century, the magnification powers of
microscopes were still comparatively low, so that the morphology of the
still mostly invisible life forms had to be imagined more than they could
be derived from actual observations. Their phenotypes were, thus, mostly
inspired by other visible, more or less small, animals often perceived as
 2 MICROGOTHIC: MICROBIAL AESTHETICS OF HAUNTED NATURE 27

eerie themselves. Accordingly, Heath’s caricature shows the merging

images of bats, fish, beetles, crayfish, and worms, which Hieronymus
Bosch (c. 1450–1516) had already brought into a nightmarish synthesis.
In one of his most famous paintings, the triptych The Temptation of Saint
Anthony (around 1500), he depicts a variety of monstrous hybrid figures
of diverse aerial and underwater life forms, some of which show astonish-
ing similarities to the ghostly microbes of Heath.
By imaginatively interweaving the microorganisms across media with
the “monstrous and prodigious things” of the hellish world from John
Milton’s Paradise Lost, Heath strikingly visualizes the uncanny idea of
microorganisms that have existed for a long time and that persisted even
on the fringes of the triumphal march of modern microscopy. The fright-
ening, until then still fantastic, assumption that ghostly microorganisms in
the drinking water derived from the Thames could threaten the well-being
of London’s population had been discussed before, but only at the end of
the century did it become a scientific fact.
In the nineteenth century, more powerful microscopes were developed,
and by the end of the century, it was finally possible to reveal the world of
the invisible to the human eye. But even after their “discovery,” microbes
did not lose their eerie character. Skepticism about their existence per-
sisted, and their elaborately constructed visibility remained doubted. After
all, it required complicated technologies and processes; a range of nutri-
ents, fixatives, and dyes; and the knowledge of what was to be seen, to
visualize the invisible: “At a basic level, it was hard to see what Koch saw”
(Whooley 150). Also, the ever-improving microscopes seemed to confirm
the especially disturbing and threatening perception of microbes. The
epoch-making discoveries of medical microbiology and bacteriology pro-
vided evidence of their potential danger, without emphasizing their use-
fulness. Indeed, the absolute necessity of their existence within the natural
order was mostly left out. Old and new skepticism, the still uncanny
appearance despite gradually improving visibility, as well as the intangible,
but therefore no less threatening pathogenicity of microbial life mani-
fested their ghostlike nature.
Heath’s image of ghostly microbes is, thus, an early visualization of the
ecogothic, a literary method and theory that is sensitive to “the fear, anxi-
ety, and dread that often pervades the relationships of humans with the
nonhuman world” (Keetley and Sivils 1). Within the ecogothic, literary
texts are questioned concerning their concept of nature as a “space of
crisis” in which the human and non-human coexist in a mutually
28 D. HÖLL

precarious relationship (Smith and Hughes 3). This central question pro-
vides information about how in literature an existential threat to human
beings seems to emanate from the “inhuman other,” “as a disturbed and
disturbing natural world, one in which boundaries between the human
and the nonhuman become blurred” (Keetley and Sivils 11). It is often
man himself who, by acting ecologically irresponsible, transforms nature
into an existential threat in the first place. Ecogothic texts make extensive
use of the formal vocabulary of gothic romanticism (Smith and Hughes 2)
and in doing so transform nature into “haunted landscapes” (Heholt 1)
turning the inhuman into a “literary monstrosity” (Del Principe 1).
William Heath’s caricature “Monster Soup” is a transmedia and inter-
disciplinary allusive testimony to the early years of modern microscopy
around the 1830s. It has a far-reaching effect as it became a “key stepping
stone in tracing the alternate narratives to miasma theory” (Smeele 18)
and, as I argue, in its eerie depiction of microscopic life a ‘hinge piece’ in
the aesthetic discourse of epidemics. Heath’s caricature becomes, as an
early example of ecogothic imagery, also the iconographic archetype of the
microgothic that imagines the invisible world of microorganisms as threat-
ening haunted nature. At the turn of the twentieth century, one of the
most important modern American authors addressed these complexities in
a unique literary way creating an outstanding poetical example of the
uncanniness of microbial life and its interactions with the human.

“[P]rofoundly vicious, treacherous and malignant”:

Mark Twain’s Three Thousand Years Among
the Microbes

Mark Twain (1835–1910) was “deeply concerned with epistemological

questions” (Ketterer xiv) and dealt intensely with scientific discourses and
technological innovations of his time (Cummings). Possessing a “reason-
ably impressive understanding of the contemporary scientific thought”
(Hume 77), he was fascinated by the imaginative and speculative force of
the world of the microcosm (Lindborg 653). Twain was familiar with con-
temporary microbiological literature like The Life of the Germ (1897) by
the famous American bacteriologist Herbert William Conn (Weed 220).
He repeatedly reflected on the intricacies of microbial life especially in
connection to their actual as well as imaginative significance for humans in
his notebooks, journals, and in personal conversations. His interest was
 2 MICROGOTHIC: MICROBIAL AESTHETICS OF HAUNTED NATURE 29

also mirrored in a recurring literary examination into the scientific, social,

and philosophical dimensions of the microbial worlds. The conclusions he
drew from this intensive occupation with the realm of the invisible were
grim. However, this was only the logical consequence of a deeply pessimis-
tic understanding of nature per se that resulted in a decidedly (eco)gothic
imagination, which a notebook entry from November 1895 impressively
depicts:

[…] there is nothing kindly, nothing beneficent, nothing friendly in Nature

towards any creature […] Nature’s attitude towards all life is profoundly
vicious, treacherous and malignant. (Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebook 255)

But mankind had no better position in Twain’s conception of the

world’s order. In an entry from August 12, 1884, Twain writes: “I think
we are only the microscopic trichina concealed in the blood of some vast
creature’s veins” (Twain, Notebooks & Journals III 56). The notion of the
parasitical trichina prominently demonstrates the ambivalence between
fascination and horror, which Twain thinks dominates the world of the
microcosm. His analogy of humans with parasites not only reveals a level-
ling of the hierarchy of life—at the top of which man seemed to stand
unchallenged—but also manifests a poor image of humanity itself.
Mankind, as Twain sees it, is merely a parasitic life form that ekes out an
existence unnoticed yet not unharmful in the body of a much larger organ-
ism to exploit and to destroy, according to the common parasite habitus.
Even the change of perspective that Twain adopts elsewhere to explore the
human-microbe relationship could not alter this dark imagination of
nature’s macroworlds and microworlds. Twain’s first biographer and edi-
tor, Albert Bigelow Paine (1861–1937), gives an account of a conversa-
tion in which Twain dealt with the question of the “forces of creation”
and held forth the shortcomings of the human race (Paine 1535). Twain
believed that since the moment of his birth, man only tried to stand up to
the numerous adversities of life, for which he is by no means equipped:
“[…] he’s the poorest, clumsiest excuse of all the creatures […] a rickety
sort of thing […] a regular British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities
[…] always undergoing repairs” (Paine 1361).
Accordingly, in Twain’s opinion, man is by no means the crown of cre-
ation; he is only a deficient vanity, at best, “a basketful of festering, pesti-
lent corruption, provided for the support and entertainment of microbes”
(Paine 1362). These dark imaginings of humans and microbes and their
30 D. HÖLL

interactions and interdependences, which find their counterpart in the

idea of nature and, thus, life itself as “profoundly vicious, treacherous and
malignant,” are also typical for his late literary works. They are exception-
ally executed in his microbial texts, The Great Dark (1898), “The Victims”
(1902), and Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes (1905), which are
not only ecogothic but in terms of their subject matter, aesthetics, and
poetics decidedly microgothic.
Twain’s first fictional microgothic text, The Great Dark, which he called
a “bacillus dream” (Tuckey, “Introduction Which Was the Dream” 25), is
in its nightmare setting a paradigmatic gothic space, a “state between
sleeping and waking, or indeed, death and life” (Martin 206). It demon-
strates the uncanny indissolubility of dream and reality, which is merged
with the monstrous world of microbes on multiple intertwined and intra-­
textual reality levels. The second microgothic writing, the short draft “The
Victims,” is another example of Twain’s deeply pessimistic worldview, in
which “all living creatures are so made that they must feed upon other liv-
ing things” (Tuckey, “Introduction Fables of Man” 4). It is the story of a
cruel cannibalistic picnic banquet that none of the guests—ranging from
microbe to man—survive. Thus, the text shows, that the actual hierarchy
of the living seems to be determined by the logic of “universal cannibal-
ism” (Tuckey, “Introduction Fables of Man” 4), a natural law for which
man is no exception.
The literary highlight of Twain’s intensive study of microscopy and the
microcosms is revealed without question in the novel fragment Three
Thousand Years Among the Microbes, written in 1905 but posthumously
published in 1967 (Tuckey, “Introduction Which Was the Dream”). In
this text, the narratological structure of which is probably unparalleled in
the history of modern literature, the narrator is a former human scientist
who, due to a failed magic experiment, has been transformed into a
microbe. He is named “Bkshp” but called “Huck” by the microbial co-­
inhabitants as an abbreviation of its middle name “Huxley.” The microbial
protagonist now lives in the body of the vagrant “Blitzkowski,” who
recently had immigrated from Hungary. However, despite his microbial
appearance, Huck’s former human consciousness has partly remained and
takes possession of him in frequent flashbacks. The microbial first-person
narrator reports from the retrospective of 3000 years of microbial time,
equivalent to about 3 weeks in human time on the challenges of being a
bacterium in the body of his host, supplemented by notes added 7000
more microbial years later. Drawing from the nightmarish setting of the
 2 MICROGOTHIC: MICROBIAL AESTHETICS OF HAUNTED NATURE 31

Great Dark, as well as from the predatory cannibalistic notion of “The

Victims,” the text creates an uncanny ecosystem of death and decay. In the
inclusive ecological model that is sustained by the hybridity of its compo-
nents, humans and microbes are as dependent on each other as they are
harmful to one another. The “hoary and mouldering old bald-­headed
tramp” “is wonderfully ragged, incredibly dirty, […] malicious, malig-
nant, vengeful, treacherous, […], unspeakable profane, his body is a sewer,
a reek of decay, a charnel house, and contains swarming nations of all dif-
ferent kinds of germ vermin that have been invented for the contentment
of man” (“Three Thousand Years” 436). For his microbes, he is “their
world, their globe, lord of their universe, its jewel, its marvel, its miracle,
its masterpiece” (“Three Thousand Years” 436), but for the narrator, a
“pulpy old sepulchre” as soon as his “man-nature” (“Three Thousand
Years” 437) overtakes him. The description of Blitzowski as a habitat of
microbes reflects Twain’s ambiguously pessimistic understanding of nature
as “vicious, treacherous and malignant” (Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebook
255) and of humans on the level of microbial perception in almost identi-
cal formulation as “basketful of festering, pestilent corruption, provided
for the support and entertainment of microbes” (Paine 1362). For while
the Blitzowski cosmos is a perfect miracle for most microbes, to the human
part of the microbial narrator it is just a disgusting, physically and morally
corrupted cesspool and a contaminated living grave. Blitzowski becomes a
veritable zombie with his body transformed into a gothic landscape. Thus,
in Three Thousand Years, humans and microbes in their transgressive
hybridity are both described as grotesque bodies that merge into each
other’s environments. With that they ultimately become haunted natures
to each other.
The sinister undertone persists throughout the entire text, despite vari-
ous attempts at thinking the human-microbe relationship as more posi-
tive. Twain had intensively studied, among other things, H.W. Conn’s
popular scientific standard work, The Life of the Germ, in which Conn also
highlighted the useful aspects of bacteria and postulated: “Bacteria, in
general, are agents for good rather than for ill” (Conn 129). But for
Twain, “[t]he negative side of the adventures with microbes was more
impressive” (Lindborg 656). In Three Thousand Years, the cruelly indiffer-
ent cycle of life, which permeates micro- and macrocosms equally, is an
eternal cycle of infection “and endless chain of predation” (Taylor 483), in
which epidemics become the driving force:
32 D. HÖLL

The inexorable logic of the situation was this: there being a Man, with a
Microbe to infect him, and for him to be indifferent about; and there being
a Sooflasky,3 with a Swink4 to infest him and for the said Sooflsaky to be
indifferent about: then it follows, for a certainty, that the Swink is similarily
infested, too…and…that below that infester there is yet another infester
that infests him – and so down and down and down till you strike the bot-
tomest bottom of created life – if there is one, which is extremely doubtful.
(Twain, “Three Thousand Years” 527)

Thus, Mark Twain’s Three Thousand Years, together with his other
microbial writings, are key texts for the intricacies of human-non-human-­
environmental entanglements especially in the frame of epidemics. The
hybridization of man and microbe that Mark Twain performs by fusing a
human scientist with a bacterium already problematizes in a poetically,
ethically, and epistemologically radical way which from today’s humanity’s
perspective is theoretically grasped, for example, under the term “trans-­
corporeality” (Alaimo), and investigated in the life sciences through inclu-
sive human-non-human concepts like the microbiome, the symbiont, or
the holobiont. Since the problematic interaction of humanity and its
human as well as non-human environments is one of the most pressing
topics of the ‘One Health’5 debate, these concepts are of special interest
for their possibly vital ecological and biomedical significance and thus are
researched in a variety of interdisciplinary and highly funded research proj-
ects around the globe.

The Microbiome and Its Epistemological

and Aesthetic Challenges in BioArt

Microgothic aesthetics seemed to have been mostly absorbed in the “out-

break narrative” of the abundant contagion literature published in the last
decades. As Priscilla Wald argues:

Microbes, spaces, and interactions blend together as they animate the land-
scape and motivate the plot of the outbreak narrative: a contradictory but
compelling story of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of
human connection and cooperation, scientific authority and the evolution-
ary advantages of the microbe, ecological balance and impending disas-
ter. (Wald)
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
„Is het waar?”

„Ja, granman anansi!”

„Mi papíera wanni”. 115

De Gouverneur stemde toe en Spin kreeg dus een half dorp, in plaats
van het kind.

Maar ik moet ook een karta 116 hebben, voegde heer Spin er haastig bij.
En toen hij ook dit gekregen had, werd het kind met militaire eer
begraven. Heer Spin had nu zijn doel bereikt en keerde weder in zijn
tjoewa tjoewa naar huis terug.

Dadelijk begaf hij zich naar de woning van den Gouverneur, met wien hij
de weddenschap had aangegaan. Deze ontving hem vrij koel en sprak
norsch:

„Waar is nu het halve dorp?”

„Welnu, maak geen drukte, op een bedaarden toon als ’t U belieft, hier
zijn de eigendomsbewijzen.” De Gouverneur veranderde dadelijk van
toon, gaf Spin de hand en zeide:

„Ik dank U, ik zal U beloonen; in mijn huis zult ge wonen en Uwe

kinderen zullen met mijn volk ook in huizen wonen”.

„Waar dan?”

„Wel in beslagruimten”. 117

Doch heer Spin verkoos dat niet, en toen hij den beul zag komen,
waarmede de Gouverneur hem gedreigd had, liep hij hard weg en
sprong zelf in een reet van den muur.

En van dien dag af heeft heer Spin in hoeken en gaten der huizen zijn
intrek genomen. [266]
No. 2. Spin en de Prinses.

Langen tijd bewoonde Spin een rijk, dat geheel omringd was door
onderhoorige dorpen. Hij was er erg bemind en bijna ieder meisje
schonk hem haar hart, want hij was buitengewoon schoon.

Na tal van jaren vestigde heer Spin zich in een ander rijk, dat aan de hel
grensde. De koning van dat land had drie dochters, die hij wenschte uit
te huwelijken.

Kapitein Spin vatte het plan op, een harer te gaan vragen. Hij liep
verschillende dorpen af om kleedingstukken te leenen, want hij bezat
niets; daarna begaf hij zich naar het paleis en deed aanzoek om de
hand der jongste dochter, die hij ook kreeg. Drie maanden bracht heer
Spin in het paleis door, maar niet één keer verkleedde hij zich.

Toen de dag van vertrek aanbrak, werd een 1ste klasse-stoomer voor het
jonge paar in gereedheid gebracht. Heer Spin sprak:

„Indien het U onverschillig is, zou ik de reis liever per rijtuig doen, dan
per stoomboot, daar mijn gezondheid er niet tegen kan”.

„Goed, zooals ge wilt, hoeveel paarden zal ik laten voorspannen?”

„Een stuk of tien”.

Aan het verzoek werd voldaan en heer Spin vertrok met zijn vrouw.

Aan het eerste dorp gekomen stapte hij uit en kwam hij na een kwartier
zonder hoed terug. Zijn vrouw durfde hem niet te vragen, waar hij
gebleven was, want heer Spin had haar onder bedreiging van den
doodstraf verboden te spreken of te schreeuwen.

Aan het volgende dorp gekomen, stapte hij weder uit en kwam hij na
een kwartier zonder regenscherm terug, Zijn vrouw schrok, maar durfde
niets te zeggen. [267]
Kort daarop verwijderde heer Spin zich weder en nu kwam hij zonder
jas terug. Zijn vrouw werd angstig, toen zij hem op deze wijze van
gedaante zag veranderen.

Zoo ging het door van dorp tot dorp, tot hij eindelijk geheel naakt
terugkwam. Onderweg had hij achtereenvolgens teruggegeven, wat hij
vóór zijn huwelijk geleend had.

Thuis gekomen ging Meneer rusten. ’s Middags ging hij uit, zijn vrouw,
die aanhoudend weende, achterlatend. Hij ging toen naar zijn buurman,
den duivel, en vroeg hem, of hij iets wilde koopen. Samen kwamen zij
terug en anansi verkocht hem ’s vorsten dochter. Didibri 118 nam haar
mede, liet haar in kettingen slaan en onder aan een boom binden.

De Koning, die gehoord had van het droevig lot van zijn dochter, snelde
haar te hulp. Hij trof heer Spin thuis en sprak:

„Ellendige, waar is mijn dochter?”

„Jouw dochter?”

„Ja, mijn dochter?”

„Dat gaat je niet aan; ik ben toch met haar getrouwd, je hebt niets meer
met haar te maken”.

„Wat zeg je daar, vent!”

„Ben je doof?”

„Pakt dien ellendeling op!”.

„Een oogenblik. Je dochter is bij mijn vriend. Je kunt haar gaan halen”.

De vorst, die zijn plichten als vader wilde vervullen, begaf zich op
aanwijzing van heer Spin naar het naburige dorp, de hel. Hij schrok
hevig, want zijn dochter stond op korten afstand van een grooten ketel,
die minstens wel vijf man kon bevatten.

„Kind, wat is er gebeurd?”

„Heer Spin heeft mij aan den duivel verkocht. Heden [268]word ik
geslacht. De duivel heeft tal van vrienden uitgenoodigd, om aan het
feestmaal deel te nemen. Spin komt mij binnen het uur slachten. Papa
ga weg, anders ondergaat U hetzelfde lot als ik”.

De duivel kwam thuis en anansi zong:

Mi séri mi azéman 119

Didibri antwoordde:

Doendoe ka, ka doendoe! 120

en doodde daarop den vorst. Hij begroef hem achter zijn woning en
stelde den dood der prinses uit, daar hij niet meer dan één persoon per
dag mocht doen sterven.

Heer Spin stelde voor, den koning op te eten, maar de duivel wilde er
niet van hooren.

Het meisje had een broêr, van wien zij niets hield en dien zij zooveel
mogelijk vermeed. Deze jonge man leed aan framboesia tropica* en
onttrok zich aan ieders oogen. Hij was zeer ervaren in het tooveren en
bezat formulieren, die elke menschelijke kunst te boven gingen. Toen hij
vernam, dat zijn vader door zijn schoonzoon gedood was, dacht hij bij
zich zelf:

„Bloed moet door bloed gewroken worden; oog om oog, tand om tand”,
en hij zocht dadelijk Spin op.

„Waarde zwager, waar is mijn vader?”

„Wie is jouw vader?”

„Jouw schoonvader!”

„Schoonvader?” Spin haalde de schouders op.

„Houd me niet voor den gek, want ik vermoord je!”

„Ga naar het naburige huis, je vader is er op bezoek”.

„Goed”.

„De jongeman kwam in de hel. In de verte zag hij [269]den duivel

aankomen, waarop hij zich achter zijn zuster verschool.

Didibri kwam thuis. Anansi zong hem toe:

Foenkete! Foenkete! 121

„Er is niemand hier,” zei de duivel.

„Ben ik dan niemand?” vroeg het jonge meisje.

„Ja, ik ben hier,” antwoordde de jongeling.

„Wat doe je hier?”

„Ik kom mijn vader halen”.

De duivel slikte hem in, maar hij kwam weêr ongedeerd te voorschijn.
Zoo deed hij verschillende malen, maar zonder gevolg. Toen nam hij
een langen ijzeren staaf, maakte hem gloeiend heet, en stak hem
daarna in het lichaam van den jongeling, maar ook nu stierf hij niet.

De duivel vroeg hem:

„Slaap je?”
„Neen”.

„Waarom niet?”

„Die pokken doen pijn, ik kan niet slapen”.

Heer Spin, de medewerker des duivels, gaf hem den raad, den
jongeling een slaapmiddel te geven. „Maar, wees voorzichtig”,
vermaande hij, „want, als het lichaam slaapt, waakt de ziel”.

„Heb jij dan een ziel, anansi?”

Didibri vroeg toen den jongen man: „Wat zal ik je geven?”

„Mijne moeder gaf mij soep van keisteenen, dat was het eenige middel”.

De duivel ging toen voor kok spelen, maar de keisteenen wilden niet
zacht worden.

„Ga naar het strand,” beval heer Spin zijn schoonbroêr, „ik zal je wel
daarheen brengen”. [270]

„Jij hem brengen?” vroeg de duivel.

„Ik zal er voor zorgen”.

„Goed, ik reken er op”.

Den volgenden morgen ried anansi zijn schoonbroêr aan, in het belang
van zijn gezondheid een bad te gaan nemen, daar hij anders wel nooit
zou genezen.

Spin ging met list te werk, daar hij, noch de duivel er in slaagde, den
jongeman te dooden.

„Goed, zwager, maar wees voorzichtig met mij, denk niet, dat ik je
vrouw ben, en dat je me zal kunnen dooden”.
„Maar, zwager, je kent me toch”.

„Nu, en of ik je ken”.

Zij gingen naar het water en heer Spin begon te zingen:

Foenkete! Foenkete!

De duivel kwam uit het water, slikte den jongeling in, maar hij kwam er
weêr levend uit.

„Nu vermoord ik jelui beiden, jou en Spin”.

„Neen, Mijnheer! Ik heb toch niets gedaan. Heer Spin heeft mij een nimf
aangeboden, en ik heb haar gekocht”.

„Waar is mijn vader?”

„Hij is dood”.

„Daarom zal ik je dooden”.

„Ik zal je vader het leven teruggeven”.

„Ik zal het zelf doen”.

Heer Spin beefde van angst.

De duivel slikte den jongeling weêr in, maar deze doorstak hem met een
speer.

Heer Spin zweefde over het water en zette zich op een boom. De
jongeling vervolgde hem; maar Spin sprong naar beneden en maakte
zich uit de voeten.

Toen ging de jongeman zijn zuster bevrijden en zijn [271]vader het leven
teruggeven, waarna zij samen in hun land terugkeerden.
Heer Spin durfde zich niet meer te vertoonen en sedert dien tijd heeft hij
zijn intrek in reten en hoeken genomen.

No. 3. Het huwelijk van Heer Spin.

In zeker land regeerde een vorst, die een dochter had, schoon als de
volle maan. Er kwamen vorstenzonen uit verre landen, om haar hand te
vragen, maar zij weigerde allen.

Granman anansi 122, dit hoorende, liet zich naar dat land roeien in een
twaalfriems tentboot, en nam zijn viool mede.

Toen Zijne Excellentie de landingsplaats naderde, riep de stuurman

hem toe:

„Mi Granman, siengi joe fienjólo”. 123

Heer Spin begon te spelen en zong er het volgende liedje bij:

„Mi jére, pikien misi

No wanni man, ô ô ô ô!” 124

Z. M. de Koning hoorde deze hemelsche muziek en zond een gedeelte

zijner troepen ter plaatse, met bevel den muzikant naar het paleis te
brengen.

De manschappen en hovelingen ijlden heen, en tot hun verwondering

zagen zij, dat het Gouverneur Spin was. Hij werd op plechtige wijze
begroet, waarna men hem het verlangen van Z. M. mededeelde.

„A boen, wakka, mi de kom!” 125

Heer Spin logeerde een poos ten paleize, waar hij op de handen
gedragen werd, doch na eenige dagen besloot Zijne Excellentie weêr
naar zijn dorp terug te keeren. [272]
„Ach! Papa”, riep het meisje, „kunt U Z. E. niet hier houden en tot
rijksmuzikant of opperzanger benoemen?”

Granman anansi viel haar in de rede:

„Dat zal niet gaan, tenzij ik met U trouw!”

„Nu, dat is goed”, antwoordden vader en dochter tegelijk.

Spin was de gevierde in huis; hij mocht maken en breken wat hij wilde;
hij was letterlijk heer en meester geworden.

Het jonge paar zou dan trouwen.

Schoonpapa stelde zijn schoonzoon voor, om versch vleesch te laten

koopen.

„Dat behoeft niet; geef mij maar geld, dat U voor versch vleesch wilt
besteden, ik zal er voor zorgen; maar, nog wat, laat voor mijn vrienden
een flink huis bouwen met een ijzeren deur. U moet ook aan alle
naburige vorsten mijn huwelijk bekend maken, want dan kunnen zij mij
nog ’t een en ander ten geschenke geven. Laat U het niet weten, dan
houden zij zich stil, en ben ik de lijdende persoon, niet waar, want dat
zijn me anders geen gulle snappers!”

Aan Anansi’s verzoek werd voldaan en op den dag vóór de

huwelijksvoltrekking waren alle vrienden en kennissen van het jonge
paar verzameld.

Anansi’s vrienden kwamen ook en werden verzocht hun intrek in het

ijzeren huis te nemen. Toen allen er in waren, sloot heer Spin de deur
af.

Krekel, die reeds eenmaal werd beetgenomen, zong op den drempel

van het huis:

„Dia, dia, sa’ joe dê wan dom méti!” 126

De aanstaande bruidegom gaf nu bevel, rondom het gebouw een vuur
aan te leggen; het werd gedaan en alle [273]dieren verbrandden. Daarna
noodigde hij alle gasten van den Koning beleefd uit, de dieren te helpen
villen en schoonmaken.

„Hm! Hm!” zuchtten de prinsen en de andere edellieden.

„Heden mag geen verdriet zijn, daar het morgen mijn trouwdag is”, zei
Spin.

Ik begrijp ze wel, dacht Anansi, ze willen niet helpen werken, maar wel
helpen eten; ik ben dus eigenlijk hun slaaf. Neen, dat staat niet in de
boeken geschreven, wel staat er: in het zweet uws aanschijns zult ge
uw brood verdienen!

Eindelijk werd het werk verricht en den anderen dag trouwde hij het
meisje.

Heer Spin bleef in het paleis wonen en zijn kinderen kwamen bij de
naburige vorsten aan huis.

Door streken is de spin overal gekomen, tot zelfs in vorstenwoningen

toe.

No. 4. Anansi, Tijger en de doode Koe.

Heer Spin, die de kost verdienen moest voor zijn groot gezin, kreeg
haast niets van hetgeen hij meêbracht; dikwijls moest hij met een leege
maag naar bed, hetgeen hem in ’t geheel niet beviel.

„Dat gaat zoo niet langer”, dacht hij, „hard werken voor weinig loon, en
niet eens je bekomst eten, dat gaat niet …!”
Na lange overpeinzingen ging hij vet stelen uit den buik van een koe.
Waardoor hij zich toegang verschafte, zeg ik liever niet.

„Ze moeten die gulzigheid afleeren; ik ga nog niet naar huis; eerst zal ik
zelf wat eten en meênemen hetgeen er overblijft”.

Heer Spin ging bij zijn vriend Tijger aankloppen en vroeg hem in zijn
kippenhok te mogen overnachten.

„Ja”, antwoordde Tijger met een heel grove stem.

Heer Spin kroop in het hok en in het stille middernachtelijk [274]uur steeg
er rook omhoog, toen hij bezig was het vet te bakken.

Tijger werd wakker van den damp en trad op het kippenhok toe.

„Màti 127 Anansi, wat gebeurt hier? Ik had kunnen sterven van schrik. Ik
heb een kleintje gedaan in mijn broek. Geef mij een gedeelte van dat
vet, vriend, want ik heb honger gekregen, om je de waarheid te
zeggen”.

„Eet maar naar hartelust vriend, ga je gang”.

Tijger vrat zijn bekomst en vroeg, waar hij dat vet had gehaald.

„Ik wil het je wel vertellen, vriend, en je meênemen ook, maar je laat me
vangen en jij misschien er bij”.

„Wel neen, vriend, ik ben toch niet gek!”

„Nu goed! morgenavond neem ik je meê, hoor!”

Tijger geloofde het maar half; hij ging Spin halen en ze gingen te zamen
naar den stal van het dorpshoofd. Heer Spin zei zijn formulieren op, de
koe ging open en zij traden samen binnen.
Anansi vulde zijn jachttasch met vet, terwijl Tijger alles opat, wat heer
Spin afsneed.

„Neem je geen stuk meê voor je vrouw? Snijdt vlug nog een stuk af, ik
ga al vast naar buiten”. De woeste tijger sneed maar raak en trof het
beest in het hart, zoodat het op hetzelfde oogenblik dood neêrviel.

„Heb ik het niet gezegd? Nu zijn wij gevangen”.

„Help me vriend Spin!”

„Kruip in de darmen, ik ga in de vocali-pens 128”.

Zoo gezegd, zoo gedaan, de heeren namen hun intrek als voren
genoemd.

De doode koe werd naar het slachthuis vervoerd, waar de veearts de

sectie deed. De vocalipens werd [275]weggegooid en opgepikt door
eenige oude negers, die de tripa 129 graag lustten. Een der negers sneed
de pens open en Spin sprong er uit, voordat iemand hem had gezien.
Daarop begon hij te schreeuwen „Jelui bent allemaal gek. Nu is het voor
jelui verantwoording. Mijn pak heb je vuil gemaakt; ik sta hier niet voor
niemendal. De dokters weten er niets van; geen van hen kan den dood
der koe diagnoseeren; is het niet ’s lands geld weggooien. Ik weet het
veel beter dan al die heeren met hun geleerde koppen en lange
namen”.

Het hoofd van het dorp hoorde dit en vroeg heer Spin of hij gek was,
dan wel of er een streep door zijn hoofd liep.

„Wat belieft U mijnheer? Ik ben niet gek, maar gij zijt het, dat ge U zoo
maar alles wijs laat maken”.

„Weet je niet tegen wien je spreekt? Ik ben het dorpshoofd”. De

doktoren vroegen Spin zich in bijzijn van het Hoofd te verantwoorden
over zijne woorden.
„Je verklaart je nader, of ik laat je gevangen nemen, vagebond!”

„Excellentie! Ik ben maar een arme spin, die op een armenschool

geweest is. Ik heb niet veel geleerd, maar wel veel ondervinding
opgedaan. Men zegt in den regel: droomen zijn bedrog, maar mijn
hoofd bedriegt me niet. De koe is vermoord door Tijger, die nog in zijn
buik moet zitten, volgens mijn droom. Als U de darmen laat
opensnijden, zult U hem vinden met ap- en dependentie; maar U moet
maatregelen nemen, om hem te vangen; want hij zal willen vluchten. Ik
had hem een tijdje tot vriend, maar om zijn smerige streken heb ik hem
laten loopen; ik wed, dat als hij mij hier ziet, hij durft zeggen, dat ik de
koe gedood heb”.

De koe werd onderzocht en Tijger gevonden. Heer Spin kreeg een

belooning van 25 gulden, zooals in de publicatie der kolonie vermeld
staat. [276]

No. 5. Anansi en zijn kinderen.

Tijdens een hongersnood ging heer Spin gebukt onder kommer en

verdriet. Zooals iedereen weet, slaat hij een flinke vork 130 en hij bezit
bovendien een vrouw en twaalf kinderen.

Eens, toen ’Ma Akoeba 131 de kinderen te eten gaf, bemerkte zij, dat
haar voorraad niet toereikend zou zijn en vroeg haren echtgenoot:

„Fa’ mi de go doe tidè 132. Wie moet eten en wie niet? Mass’ra, fa’ joe
denki mi sa doe? 133 Zal ik je twee bananen, en de kinderen elk één
geven?”

„Wel neen, vrouwtje, geef die arme schapen hun portie, ik zal wel zien,
hoe ik aan eten kom”.

„Wil je dan niet eten van daag, of heb je geen honger?”

„Zorg voor jezelf en de kinderen, heb ik je gezegd, bekommer je niet om
mij”.

’Ma Akoeba gaf ieder kind twee bananen en behield er een voor zich.

„Ik ben klaar”.

Toen stond vader op, ging tusschen zijn kinderen staan en vroeg:
ging tusschen zijn kinderen staan en vroeg: …—Zie blz. 276.
„Mi pikíen, mi pikíen, sóema foe óenoe lobi papa móro foeloe?” 134

„Mi, mi, mi” 135 antwoordden de kinderen.

„Wel, dan moet ieder, die mij liefheeft, mij een banaan geven”.

Vader Spin deed de ronde en kreeg van ieder kind een banaan.

„Dat is niet eerlijk, mass’ra” 136 riep Akoeba. [277]

„Dat is jouw zaak, vrouw. Ik heb je gezegd, voor je zelf te zorgen, jij hebt
het eten verdeeld. Dat jij slechts één banaan genomen hebt, kan ik niet
helpen”.

Moeder Spin zweeg en vader Spin at, als gewoonlijk, zijn bekomst.

No. 6. Hoe Spin zijn schuldeischers betaalt.

Men vertelt, dat in den ouden tijd een hongersnood was uitgebroken,
die menig huishouden te niet deed gaan.

Heer Spin daarentegen keek het ongeluk vlak in het gezicht en begaf
zich daarna bij zijn buurman Kakkerlak* die den landbouw uitoefende en
nam bij hem een groote hoeveelheid aardvruchten op crediet; daarna
ging hij naar zijn vriendin Hen en vroeg haar wat rijst. Van vriend Vos
leende hij wat groente, van Tijger wat vleesch en ten slotte van een
jager wat geschoten wild.

Eenige weken daarna kwam Kakkerlak bij heer Spin, om het geld in
ontvangst te nemen, daar deze zijn schuld nog niet had voldaan.

Heer Spin was in de keuken.

„Goeden dag, vriend Spin!”

„Goeden morgen! Je zult lang leven, vriend; ik had juist besloten,
vandaag het geld op te zenden. Ga even naar binnen, want het is hier
warm. Ik kom aanstonds bij je, als deze banaan geschild is. Neem je
gemak, doe alsof je thuis waart”.

Heer Spin bezat echter geen cent en verzon een list, om van zijn
schuldeischers af te komen.

Na verloop van een kwartier riep Kakkerlak verschrikt uit: „Vriend Spin,
ik ben verloren!”

„Verloren!”

„Hoezoo?”

„Kijk daarginds in de verte komt mijn vijandin aan!”

„Wie dan toch?”

„Hen!” [278]

„Is dat alles? Ga onder de canapé schuilen en blijf rustig zitten. Zij zal je
niets doen; je kunt op mij rekenen!”

Kakkerlak liet het zich geen twee keer zeggen en kroop onder de
canapé.

„Goeden dag, kapitein Spin!”

„Goeden dag, waarde vriendin!”

„Goeden dag, waarde vriendin”.—Zie blz. 278.
„Hoe is het met de kleintjes thuis? Ik kom bij U om de zaak.…”

„Zaak? Welke zaak! O! Geld zeker, is het niet?”

„Ja kapitein!”

„Ga binnen, ik kom bij je, zoodra ik dit stukje bakkeljauw* geroosterd
heb”.

Naar binnen gaande, schreeuwde Hen plotseling: „Kapitein, kapitein, ik

ben weg!”

„Weg? Je moet niet weg, ik ben dadelijk klaar!”

„Neen, ik ga niet weg, maar ik ga dood!”

„Dood? Hoezoo?”

„Daarginds komt Vos aan, hij zal mij opeten!”

„Wel neen, vriendin, ga onder de canapé schuilen, maar beweeg je

niet!”

Zoo gezegd, zoo gedaan. Hen kroop onder de canapé en at Kakkerlak

op.

Vos naderde; kapitein Spin groette hem, en Vos verzocht hem om het
verschuldigde geld.

„Wel vriend, ik verwachtte je; ik heb het reeds eenige dagen geleden
voor je klaargelegd”.

„Kom binnen en neem je gemak; ik ben bezig voor den pot te zorgen”.

„Zoo, dan eet ik met je meê vandaag, want ik verga van den honger”.

„Met genoegen, waarde vriend, van harte welkom!”

Vos ging binnen en nam plaats op de canapé.

„Hm, het ruikt hier naar kip!” [279]

Na eenigen tijd gewacht te hebben, riep Vos zijn gastheer toe, dat Tijger
in aantocht was en dat deze hem zonder twijfel tot zijn prooi zou maken.

„Kom, vriend, Tijger is zoo slecht niet”.

„Maar ik wil liever niets met hem te maken hebben”.

„Wil je dan schuilen?”

„Ja, natuurlijk!”

„Tracht dan voorzichtig onder de canapé te komen, en beweeg je niet”.

„Ja, Kapitein!”

Vos kroop voorzichtig onder de canapé, bemerkte Hen en at haar op.

Tijger kwam bij heer Spin en maakte zijn opwachting.

„Goeden morgen, Gouverneur! ik kwam bij U om die kleinigheid!”

„Kleinigheid, wat bedoel je?”

„Wel, hebt U dan vergeten, wat U bij mij op crediet hebt genomen?”

„O ja! En je komt om het geld niet waar? Ja ik heb het reeds sedert een
paar dagen in mijn valies. Ga naar binnen en neem je gemak; ik kom
aanstonds”.

Tijger trad binnen, zette zich neêr en begon met een awari-bangi* te
spelen. Plotseling riep hij verschrikt uit:

„Heer Spin, red mij! Ik ga sterven, daar komt de jager aan”.