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Article 3: Bodies, the nonprocreative, and the queer sublime in Melancholia
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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgrl20
Volcanoes, guts and cosmic collisions:
the queer sublime in Frankenstein and
Melancholia
Eric Robertsona
a Department of Humanities, Utah Valley University, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Published online: 27 Feb 2014.
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rgrl20
Volcanoes, guts and cosmic collisions:
the queer sublime in Frankenstein and
Melancholia
Eric Robertsona
a Department of Humanities, Utah Valley University, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Published online: 27 Feb 2014.
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To cite this article: Eric Robertson (2014) Volcanoes, guts and cosmic collisions: the queer
sublime in Frankenstein and Melancholia, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 18:1, 63-77, DOI:
10.1080/14688417.2014.890530
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.890530
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.890530
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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2014
Vol. 18, No. 1, 63–77, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.890530
Volcanoes, guts and cosmic collisions: the queer sublime in Frankenstein and Melancholia
Eric Robertson*
Department of Humanities, Utah Valley University, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
(Received 19 September 2013; accepted 29 January 2014)
This paper explores the possible relationship between queer bodies, ones strictly defined as nonprocreative, and Jane Bennett’s concept of vital materialism. We’ll ask a couple of big questions: How do nonprocreative bodies find themselves as mythic figures within narratives and to what ecological end could those figural positions be of some benefit?
Hidden in the texts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lars Von Trier’s film Melancholia lurks George Bataille’s concept of the Jesuve. This queer sublime is the violent manifestation of material instability felt keenly by the abject, nonprocreative body. The sublime of the Jesuve revels in the subject’s explosive disfigurement as it anticipates the reuse of human matter and identity.
Can we find existential comfort in considering the recycling of the human body, not as a spiritual rebirth, but as a vibrant material up-cycling? Can volcanoes, cosmic collisions and queer bodies become an integral part of human ecological ontologies?
Keywords: Jesuve; new queer materialism; nonprocreative; abject; queer sublime
If environmentalists are selves who live on earth, vital materialists are selves who live as earth, who are more alert to the capacities and limitations—the ‘jizz’—of the various materials that they are.
Jane Bennett
Introduction
There is a Catalonian idiom that expresses both the independent spirit of the people living on the Mediterranean Coast of southern Spain and a state of mind that exists in which the social constructs of culture meet the workings of the material body. Even the Pope poops. The exalted, socially constructed Pontificate cannot escape the inevitable confrontation with waste and decay and the embarrassment of a bared ass and a grimace as he evacuates his bowels. Just what does the Pope think of himself in such instances? The material Pope is a Pope who poops, and with that realisation an abject figural position is added to his ecclesiastical designation.
There are processes going on inside bodies that produce Jane Bennett’s jizz, a base materiality that reveals an often neglected truth – beneath hard and seemingly coherent exteriors, there is a rumbling that disturbs ideas of stasis and wholeness. Guts, biles, gases, feces and jizms of many kinds – states of matter that appear to lack material agency and therefore consciousness, what some consider (mistakenly) dead matter – challenge the reasoned mind as it believes in the autonomy of the body it thinks it controls. For the
*Email: eric.robertson@uvu.edu © 2014 ASLE-UKI
Vol. 18, No. 1, 63–77, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.890530
Volcanoes, guts and cosmic collisions: the queer sublime in Frankenstein and Melancholia
Eric Robertson*
Department of Humanities, Utah Valley University, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
(Received 19 September 2013; accepted 29 January 2014)
This paper explores the possible relationship between queer bodies, ones strictly defined as nonprocreative, and Jane Bennett’s concept of vital materialism. We’ll ask a couple of big questions: How do nonprocreative bodies find themselves as mythic figures within narratives and to what ecological end could those figural positions be of some benefit?
Hidden in the texts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lars Von Trier’s film Melancholia lurks George Bataille’s concept of the Jesuve. This queer sublime is the violent manifestation of material instability felt keenly by the abject, nonprocreative body. The sublime of the Jesuve revels in the subject’s explosive disfigurement as it anticipates the reuse of human matter and identity.
Can we find existential comfort in considering the recycling of the human body, not as a spiritual rebirth, but as a vibrant material up-cycling? Can volcanoes, cosmic collisions and queer bodies become an integral part of human ecological ontologies?
Keywords: Jesuve; new queer materialism; nonprocreative; abject; queer sublime
If environmentalists are selves who live on earth, vital materialists are selves who live as earth, who are more alert to the capacities and limitations—the ‘jizz’—of the various materials that they are.
Jane Bennett
Introduction
There is a Catalonian idiom that expresses both the independent spirit of the people living on the Mediterranean Coast of southern Spain and a state of mind that exists in which the social constructs of culture meet the workings of the material body. Even the Pope poops. The exalted, socially constructed Pontificate cannot escape the inevitable confrontation with waste and decay and the embarrassment of a bared ass and a grimace as he evacuates his bowels. Just what does the Pope think of himself in such instances? The material Pope is a Pope who poops, and with that realisation an abject figural position is added to his ecclesiastical designation.
There are processes going on inside bodies that produce Jane Bennett’s jizz, a base materiality that reveals an often neglected truth – beneath hard and seemingly coherent exteriors, there is a rumbling that disturbs ideas of stasis and wholeness. Guts, biles, gases, feces and jizms of many kinds – states of matter that appear to lack material agency and therefore consciousness, what some consider (mistakenly) dead matter – challenge the reasoned mind as it believes in the autonomy of the body it thinks it controls. For the
*Email: eric.robertson@uvu.edu © 2014 ASLE-UKI
Downloaded by [Reprints Desk Inc] at 11:33 12 March 2015
64 E. Robertson
reasoning mind, abject states that exist outside scientific or socially constructed rubrics are
to be measured, explained, categorised and controlled. Yet we are still drawn to mythic
representations of disfigurement and destruction, which are representations of these less
visible, more chaotic states of matter. In our fascination with stories of death and
dissolution, don’t we secretly desire a closer, more mystically rewarding experience of
these states?
A queer ecocritical reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ([1818] 1994) and Lars Von Trier’s recent film Melancholia (2011) will show how the creative figurations of a particular abject human state, the nonprocreative body, addresses the complex mythic relationship humans have towards the ecological realities of death, debasement and decay. Figuring Victor Frankenstein and Justine as characters living in queer bodies, ones we’ll define as nonprocreative, helps to illustrate how abject human states come into contact with the jizz and how those states negotiate a mythic position in relation to Bennett’s vital materialism. Is there a unique relationship between queer nonprocreative bodies and Bennett’s vital materiality – something sublime?
In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010), edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, queer bodies and ecology meet. These authors address how nonnormative sexual practices and gender expressions transgress the bound- aries set by socially constructed notions of what is natural and what is unnatural. As we attempt to analyse Victor Frankenstein and Justine as materially queer and seek to place this discussion within the emergent discourse of material ecocriticism, we’ll simply view the queer body as one that does not procreate. This critical point of attack is much more narrow than the various socially constructed views taken in Queer Ecologies. But by narrowing the scope to a single material condition I hope to build upon the constructivist assessments of queer ecologists and engage, if only as precursors, categories used in behavioural ecology.
Beginning a character analysis by using the quality of that individual’s reproductive fitness may help us examine how scientific generalisations become mythic representa- tions. Here, I’ll use the behavioural ecological conditions procreative versus nonprocrea- tive and invoke the blowback of Lee Edelman’s (2004) polemic against the figural tyranny of the Child to help figure the queer body as more than just socially transgressive. Outside the symbolic orders that impose themselves upon all procreative individuals, the non- procreative Queer is free to do battle with the Child inside a queer ecological mythos, which ‘argues for a perspective based on the mobilization of queer perspectives [...] toward radical ecological ends’ (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010, 39). As a nonprocreator, the queer body invites the attention of material discourse, particularly that of behavioural ecology, as well as acceding to a unique creative figural position.
These ‘radical ecological ends’ Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson (2010) highlight in Queer Ecologies are heavily reliant on queer confrontational politicking, which challenges the way social spaces are organised.1 This type of queer ecology focuses on a new practice concerned with ‘ecological knowledges, spaces, and politics that places central attention on challenging hetero-ecologies from the perspective of non-normative sexual and gender practices’ (22). Though I heartily align myself with this perspective, I seek to move deeper into the queer body, past queer politics to a conceptual spot where the matter of subjective social reordering breaks down and we imagine nature in her hiding places. I seek a vantage point where queer becomes a mythical conduit to an abject material state in addition to being a transgressive social practice.
As with these queer political perspectives highlighted in Queer Ecologies, I too seek biophilic ends. But instead of challenging normative orders with queer politics to force
A queer ecocritical reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ([1818] 1994) and Lars Von Trier’s recent film Melancholia (2011) will show how the creative figurations of a particular abject human state, the nonprocreative body, addresses the complex mythic relationship humans have towards the ecological realities of death, debasement and decay. Figuring Victor Frankenstein and Justine as characters living in queer bodies, ones we’ll define as nonprocreative, helps to illustrate how abject human states come into contact with the jizz and how those states negotiate a mythic position in relation to Bennett’s vital materialism. Is there a unique relationship between queer nonprocreative bodies and Bennett’s vital materiality – something sublime?
In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010), edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, queer bodies and ecology meet. These authors address how nonnormative sexual practices and gender expressions transgress the bound- aries set by socially constructed notions of what is natural and what is unnatural. As we attempt to analyse Victor Frankenstein and Justine as materially queer and seek to place this discussion within the emergent discourse of material ecocriticism, we’ll simply view the queer body as one that does not procreate. This critical point of attack is much more narrow than the various socially constructed views taken in Queer Ecologies. But by narrowing the scope to a single material condition I hope to build upon the constructivist assessments of queer ecologists and engage, if only as precursors, categories used in behavioural ecology.
Beginning a character analysis by using the quality of that individual’s reproductive fitness may help us examine how scientific generalisations become mythic representa- tions. Here, I’ll use the behavioural ecological conditions procreative versus nonprocrea- tive and invoke the blowback of Lee Edelman’s (2004) polemic against the figural tyranny of the Child to help figure the queer body as more than just socially transgressive. Outside the symbolic orders that impose themselves upon all procreative individuals, the non- procreative Queer is free to do battle with the Child inside a queer ecological mythos, which ‘argues for a perspective based on the mobilization of queer perspectives [...] toward radical ecological ends’ (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010, 39). As a nonprocreator, the queer body invites the attention of material discourse, particularly that of behavioural ecology, as well as acceding to a unique creative figural position.
These ‘radical ecological ends’ Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson (2010) highlight in Queer Ecologies are heavily reliant on queer confrontational politicking, which challenges the way social spaces are organised.1 This type of queer ecology focuses on a new practice concerned with ‘ecological knowledges, spaces, and politics that places central attention on challenging hetero-ecologies from the perspective of non-normative sexual and gender practices’ (22). Though I heartily align myself with this perspective, I seek to move deeper into the queer body, past queer politics to a conceptual spot where the matter of subjective social reordering breaks down and we imagine nature in her hiding places. I seek a vantage point where queer becomes a mythical conduit to an abject material state in addition to being a transgressive social practice.
As with these queer political perspectives highlighted in Queer Ecologies, I too seek biophilic ends. But instead of challenging normative orders with queer politics to force
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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 65
inclusion and help green queer theory, I challenge order with disorder. I offer up an
additional notion of the queer nonprocreative body as a figure that cares little for politics
and is more concerned with living and dying. A queer exploration of the vital materiality
of decay and dissolution is the ‘radical ecological end’ to which I aspire, to help brown,
blacken and mottle environmental discourse – adding poop to the party, so to speak.
To help further explore how a queer nonprocreative figural position acts as a mythic mediation between states of matter we’ll ask Julia Kristeva to join forces with George Bataille to help explain how constructivist analyses of queer bodies can be heavily influenced by abject material states. Kristeva (1982) offers us this prelude:
A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. (3)
Our assertion here is that when queerness is narrowly defined as nonprocreative, it allows the individual access to an abject physical state, clearly divorced from procreative normativity and, with such a focus, death and demise become more forcefully Real.2 Outside reproductive sociology, which subjects the individual to many types of regen- erative symbolic orders, the queer body that rejects procreation experiences a materiality unburdened by the social codes and instincts of parenting. Instead, the sexuality of the nonprocreative body, divorced from an object of desire – a child, a marriage, a new normal – is abjectly aware of the material contingencies into which all matter finds itself temporarily organised. Kristeva (1982) explains the abject this way, ‘One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it. Violently and painfully’ (9).
Victor Frankenstein’s relationship with his creature is an abject relationship felt ‘violently and painfully’, due, in part, to an overarching aversion towards procreation that permeates Shelley’s novel. This reading begins our exploration and highlights the connection between abject states of being and an object-oriented experience of the sublime.
Then, we’ll examine Georges Bataille’s ([1930] 1985) concept of the Jesuve, which, I posit, is the expression of the abject as it emerges from a subjected state. The violent transformation of one state of matter into another is mythically figured in Bataille’s construction of the Jesuve. A volcano destroys itself in 1815. Victor Frankenstein, a Gothic character created a year later in 1816, is forced from a heteronormative coupling and violently compelled into a queer relationship. Justine, from Trier’s Melancholia (2011), rejects marriage and embraces cosmic annihilation. The erotic nature of the relationship between a queer body and destructive materiality is one of the central themes in Trier’s film. Here, Lee Edelman’s (2004) queer nonprocreative creed – fuck the future – finds a ghostly eroticism expressing itself through Justine both as psychic disturbance and sexual deviation.
If there is a project here, it is to provide space for myth making that relies not on the disavowal of procreation, as we view that as inevitable, but on a wider meditation on figures that give metaphoric weight to mortality – death as destiny.
To imagine how we might examine nonprocreative bodies as mythic figures, we turn to two stories about ‘messy matter’, to borrow a term from material ecocritics Dana Phillips and Heather Sullivan (2012). The focus of these stories is ‘for the most part
To help further explore how a queer nonprocreative figural position acts as a mythic mediation between states of matter we’ll ask Julia Kristeva to join forces with George Bataille to help explain how constructivist analyses of queer bodies can be heavily influenced by abject material states. Kristeva (1982) offers us this prelude:
A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. (3)
Our assertion here is that when queerness is narrowly defined as nonprocreative, it allows the individual access to an abject physical state, clearly divorced from procreative normativity and, with such a focus, death and demise become more forcefully Real.2 Outside reproductive sociology, which subjects the individual to many types of regen- erative symbolic orders, the queer body that rejects procreation experiences a materiality unburdened by the social codes and instincts of parenting. Instead, the sexuality of the nonprocreative body, divorced from an object of desire – a child, a marriage, a new normal – is abjectly aware of the material contingencies into which all matter finds itself temporarily organised. Kristeva (1982) explains the abject this way, ‘One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it. Violently and painfully’ (9).
Victor Frankenstein’s relationship with his creature is an abject relationship felt ‘violently and painfully’, due, in part, to an overarching aversion towards procreation that permeates Shelley’s novel. This reading begins our exploration and highlights the connection between abject states of being and an object-oriented experience of the sublime.
Then, we’ll examine Georges Bataille’s ([1930] 1985) concept of the Jesuve, which, I posit, is the expression of the abject as it emerges from a subjected state. The violent transformation of one state of matter into another is mythically figured in Bataille’s construction of the Jesuve. A volcano destroys itself in 1815. Victor Frankenstein, a Gothic character created a year later in 1816, is forced from a heteronormative coupling and violently compelled into a queer relationship. Justine, from Trier’s Melancholia (2011), rejects marriage and embraces cosmic annihilation. The erotic nature of the relationship between a queer body and destructive materiality is one of the central themes in Trier’s film. Here, Lee Edelman’s (2004) queer nonprocreative creed – fuck the future – finds a ghostly eroticism expressing itself through Justine both as psychic disturbance and sexual deviation.
If there is a project here, it is to provide space for myth making that relies not on the disavowal of procreation, as we view that as inevitable, but on a wider meditation on figures that give metaphoric weight to mortality – death as destiny.
To imagine how we might examine nonprocreative bodies as mythic figures, we turn to two stories about ‘messy matter’, to borrow a term from material ecocritics Dana Phillips and Heather Sullivan (2012). The focus of these stories is ‘for the most part
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66 E. Robertson
radically local. It addresses the ecosystems on your skin, under your shoes, in your
digestive tract and in your very cells, too’ (447). I hope to show that the queer sublime,
as an artistic expression, ‘is able to entertain questions about matter both savory and
unsavory, both appetizing and disgusting, in the conviction that all kinds of matter must
fall within the purview of the environmental, the ecological, and the ecocritical’ (447).
Bennett’s (2010) materially minded ideas help span the hundred-year gap between these works of art. Her ‘vibrant matter’, infused with agentic capacity, erupted from an Indonesian volcano in 1815 and covered the globe in a dusty veil of volcanic ash and gave Europe its year without a summer. Those cold and wet days and nights on the shores of Lake Geneva set a dreary Swiss stage that was primed for the creation of ghost stories and dark poetic indulgences. In Trier’s Melancholia (2011), that same material vibrancy manifests in the collision between planets and moves erotically across the body of a nonprocreative female. In anticipation of that event, Trier creates Justine who is a character with whom the viewer experiences a violent cosmic reordering. As these material processes undo linear notions of time, a material analysis of vastly different works of art helps to trouble constructed literary taxonomies and allows a convergent analysis to take place inspired by shifting states of matter and the forces that move that matter around. Victor and Justine can be read as new types of queer ecological mythic figures expressing a long-held human longing to weigh correctly our insatiable desire to live against our moral duty to die.
Shelley’s abject desire
It’s important to take a quick sidestep here to note the philosophical lineage from which the notion of a queer sublime springs. This is object-oriented sublimity proposed by Arthur Schopenhauer in contrast to Emmanuel Kant’s sublime state concocted within the mind of a subject. When objects threaten subjects with annihilation an abject state is produced and experienced as sublime. This is a state that flashes between identity and utter dissolution and engages the process of once again becoming part of the cosmic maelstrom.
Kant ([1790] 2005) professes that ‘true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the subject judging, not in the natural object’ (53). Schopenhauer (2010) extends the sublime experience beyond the limits Kant constructs and invests destructive objects with sublimity well beyond the subject’s interpretive powers of reason. The threat of annihila- tion from objects outside human reckoning creates a state of exaltation ‘and therefore the object that causes such a state is called sublime’ (142). Schopenhauer, a hundred years before Jane Bennett, argued for the agentic capacity of inorganic matter or matter we think of as dead, lifeless or inert.
In Frankenstein (1818), we see the sublime quality of the destructive object. Victor’s object of scientific inquiry, his creature, forever nameless and identity-less, is sublime in that it disrupts Victor’s notions of a procreative selfhood. Victor’s creature-object, denied his reproductive partner, becomes a destructive force that clings to Victor even to the complete destruction of both creator and created. This relationship is queerly sublime in that it insists on an ecstatic force that revels in the disassembling of human matter. In arrogant opposition to that force, Victor Frankenstein stitches together a human being that he presumes will be magnificent: ‘I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!’ (Shelley [1818] 1994, 51). Victor wants a beautiful man. He seeks sameness. To his great disappointment, his creation is monstrous. When Victor discovers that his creature is hideous, plagued with jaundiced eyes and a lifeless skin, he quickly abandons it. The
Bennett’s (2010) materially minded ideas help span the hundred-year gap between these works of art. Her ‘vibrant matter’, infused with agentic capacity, erupted from an Indonesian volcano in 1815 and covered the globe in a dusty veil of volcanic ash and gave Europe its year without a summer. Those cold and wet days and nights on the shores of Lake Geneva set a dreary Swiss stage that was primed for the creation of ghost stories and dark poetic indulgences. In Trier’s Melancholia (2011), that same material vibrancy manifests in the collision between planets and moves erotically across the body of a nonprocreative female. In anticipation of that event, Trier creates Justine who is a character with whom the viewer experiences a violent cosmic reordering. As these material processes undo linear notions of time, a material analysis of vastly different works of art helps to trouble constructed literary taxonomies and allows a convergent analysis to take place inspired by shifting states of matter and the forces that move that matter around. Victor and Justine can be read as new types of queer ecological mythic figures expressing a long-held human longing to weigh correctly our insatiable desire to live against our moral duty to die.
Shelley’s abject desire
It’s important to take a quick sidestep here to note the philosophical lineage from which the notion of a queer sublime springs. This is object-oriented sublimity proposed by Arthur Schopenhauer in contrast to Emmanuel Kant’s sublime state concocted within the mind of a subject. When objects threaten subjects with annihilation an abject state is produced and experienced as sublime. This is a state that flashes between identity and utter dissolution and engages the process of once again becoming part of the cosmic maelstrom.
Kant ([1790] 2005) professes that ‘true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the subject judging, not in the natural object’ (53). Schopenhauer (2010) extends the sublime experience beyond the limits Kant constructs and invests destructive objects with sublimity well beyond the subject’s interpretive powers of reason. The threat of annihila- tion from objects outside human reckoning creates a state of exaltation ‘and therefore the object that causes such a state is called sublime’ (142). Schopenhauer, a hundred years before Jane Bennett, argued for the agentic capacity of inorganic matter or matter we think of as dead, lifeless or inert.
In Frankenstein (1818), we see the sublime quality of the destructive object. Victor’s object of scientific inquiry, his creature, forever nameless and identity-less, is sublime in that it disrupts Victor’s notions of a procreative selfhood. Victor’s creature-object, denied his reproductive partner, becomes a destructive force that clings to Victor even to the complete destruction of both creator and created. This relationship is queerly sublime in that it insists on an ecstatic force that revels in the disassembling of human matter. In arrogant opposition to that force, Victor Frankenstein stitches together a human being that he presumes will be magnificent: ‘I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!’ (Shelley [1818] 1994, 51). Victor wants a beautiful man. He seeks sameness. To his great disappointment, his creation is monstrous. When Victor discovers that his creature is hideous, plagued with jaundiced eyes and a lifeless skin, he quickly abandons it. The
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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 67
creature commits no crime. He utters no threatening or destructive intent. He is simply
unattractive. He is shunned because he is ugly. How different the story could have been
had the creature been as beautiful as Victor intended. What a life they could have had
together. How do we evaluate such an odd occurrence, what appears to just be a same-sex
relationship gone horribly wrong?
Frankenstein takes the reader into a liminal space between the subject and the object, between Victor and his creature. This is the creative vantage point of the abject and the queer sublime. This figural position understands the destructive object can and will eventually destroy human subjected identity and turn the subject back into base matter – the dust of the earth, the cosmic soup, the jizz. This is matter churned from a vibrant materiality ready for reordering. This is Victor Frankenstein’s greatest discovery.
I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analyzing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me. (46)
Victor makes an astute material observation – matter has a hidden life of its own outside human biological and linguistic confinements.
George Haggerty in his work Queer Gothic (2006) suggests Victor Frankenstein has a secret desire to ‘penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding places’ (52). These hiding places are where nature (matter manifesting itself in any way) does strange and abject things. Worms eat eyeballs and brains. Victor studies decay and finds that matter is never destroyed, but always reused. He is a character that ‘realizes that the terms of life are monstrous in the deep involvement with death’ (53). In his desire to queerly reconfigure matter, Victor experiences the abject qualities of a nonprocreative life that are normatively hidden. Shelley creates her horrible tale from this ecstatic desire between men who will never seed children. Death is their shared destiny and it is to be experienced without the hope of offspring. The grand, drawn out and epic quality of that death has a remarkable ecstatic appeal, one that Haggerty recognises: ‘The vast sublime that stretches before the reader, however, is the sublime loathsomeness of abjection’ (52).
The abject is a state in between personhood and dissolution. The creature is abject because his birth is queer, as is his desire for Victor. Objects of infinite reproducible beauty are what drive the full force of the Kantian sublime – giant trees, falling water, mountain ranges and awesome thunderstorms. These are life-giving and life-sustaining. The desire for the abject quality of the ugly, the unnatural or the mutant one-off and monstrous is the flashpoint of the ‘vast sublime’ Haggerty describes. Victor’s queerness is ‘the horror one’s relation to the world is painfully inappropriate and distorting to the privacy of self and that the life one wants so desperately is only death barely escaped’ (53). ‘Death barely escaped’ is the abject. This state understands the impossibility of the divine subject, which contains the permanently beautiful and life-sustaining Kantian sublime. That which is not normative or not procreative is ‘death barely escaped’.
Desire performed in an abject state is expressed without an object – without the Child. Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004) read alongside Shelley’s queer tug-of-war helps to show a queer body not as a representation of the death drive but as a figure challenging a social order bent on ignoring the death drive:
Frankenstein takes the reader into a liminal space between the subject and the object, between Victor and his creature. This is the creative vantage point of the abject and the queer sublime. This figural position understands the destructive object can and will eventually destroy human subjected identity and turn the subject back into base matter – the dust of the earth, the cosmic soup, the jizz. This is matter churned from a vibrant materiality ready for reordering. This is Victor Frankenstein’s greatest discovery.
I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analyzing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me. (46)
Victor makes an astute material observation – matter has a hidden life of its own outside human biological and linguistic confinements.
George Haggerty in his work Queer Gothic (2006) suggests Victor Frankenstein has a secret desire to ‘penetrate into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding places’ (52). These hiding places are where nature (matter manifesting itself in any way) does strange and abject things. Worms eat eyeballs and brains. Victor studies decay and finds that matter is never destroyed, but always reused. He is a character that ‘realizes that the terms of life are monstrous in the deep involvement with death’ (53). In his desire to queerly reconfigure matter, Victor experiences the abject qualities of a nonprocreative life that are normatively hidden. Shelley creates her horrible tale from this ecstatic desire between men who will never seed children. Death is their shared destiny and it is to be experienced without the hope of offspring. The grand, drawn out and epic quality of that death has a remarkable ecstatic appeal, one that Haggerty recognises: ‘The vast sublime that stretches before the reader, however, is the sublime loathsomeness of abjection’ (52).
The abject is a state in between personhood and dissolution. The creature is abject because his birth is queer, as is his desire for Victor. Objects of infinite reproducible beauty are what drive the full force of the Kantian sublime – giant trees, falling water, mountain ranges and awesome thunderstorms. These are life-giving and life-sustaining. The desire for the abject quality of the ugly, the unnatural or the mutant one-off and monstrous is the flashpoint of the ‘vast sublime’ Haggerty describes. Victor’s queerness is ‘the horror one’s relation to the world is painfully inappropriate and distorting to the privacy of self and that the life one wants so desperately is only death barely escaped’ (53). ‘Death barely escaped’ is the abject. This state understands the impossibility of the divine subject, which contains the permanently beautiful and life-sustaining Kantian sublime. That which is not normative or not procreative is ‘death barely escaped’.
Desire performed in an abject state is expressed without an object – without the Child. Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004) read alongside Shelley’s queer tug-of-war helps to show a queer body not as a representation of the death drive but as a figure challenging a social order bent on ignoring the death drive:
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68 E. Robertson
To figure the undoing of civil society, the death drive of the dominant order, is neither to be or
to become that drive [...] Rather, acceding to that figural position means recognizing and
refuses the consequences of grounding reality in the denial of the drive. (24)
If Victor’s creature is denied a procreative partner, its only other recourse to death, its existential approach to death, is to pursue his queer desire for sameness, for another male, for Victor. Victor chooses to construct a sexed and gendered male and by purposefully denying that creature his rightful avenue to reproduction, activates and amplifies the death drives lurking within both of them. This queer desire challenges Victor’s status as an enlightened subject imbued with scientific rationality and reason. Nonprocreative desire troubles the notion of an autonomous self. ‘As the death drive dissolves those congeal- ments of identity to permit us to know and survive as ourselves, so the queer must insist on disturbing, on queering social organizations as such’ (24). Both Victor and his creature rise to queer mythic positions as figures experiencing the ecstatic nature of the abject. This is the queer nonprocreative body living and dying ‘painfully and violently’.
This isn’t to suggest that queer bodies are more in tune with or more likely to experience violent and painful material states, but to propose that an abject queer body is less burdened by social orders that tend to deny the existence of such states. As Frankenstein continues to disturb, delight and inspire new generations of readers, we see how Shelley’s characters can be figured as queer and how that designation brings them closer to the mythical experience of dying. Death without progeny becomes a type of queer rapture.
The fullest extent of the sublime, according to Schopenhauer, is man’s realisation that he is merely a frail thought caught in ‘the battle of the raging elements’ (Schopenhauer [1819] 1909, 265). When man sees these most destructive tendencies of nature, he perceives himself as ‘the frail phenomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can utterly destroy’ (265). Victor becomes one of those destructive forces. He becomes a phantasm that can both create life and tear it apart. But what he creates is wrought from supernatural desire and from supernatural forces. Schopenhauer’s sublime works only as it is viewed emanating from outside the individual. ‘This is the complete impression of the sublime. Here he obtains a glimpse of a power beyond all comparison superior to the individual, threatening it with annihilation’ (265). Shelley’s text produces horror by investing this fantastic power in Victor’s mortal person. He tears apart the sutured female flesh of a reproductive partner as the creature watches. Revealing that nothing in nature is inert (cue Bennett’s vital materiality), the only activity left for the creature, his only recourse to death, is to destroy. ‘The creature becomes the measure of Victor’s abjection’ (Haggerty 2006 55).
Queer desire returns to Victor on his wedding night. After the creature kills Elizabeth, Victor is also no longer one half of a procreative relationship. A queer sublime lingers, which produces an abject awareness of matter as it acts on immeasurably small material levels mostly ignored by human subjects.
...I heard a shrill and dreadful scream. It came from the room in which Elizabeth had retired. As I heard it, the whole truth rushed into my mind, my arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended; I could feel the blood trickling in my veins, and tingling in the extremities of my limbs. (Shelley [1818] 1994, 207)
A queer experience of death excites matter on the smallest scale and produces a sublime material experience. The sublime’s ‘immeasurable greatness dwindles the individual to
If Victor’s creature is denied a procreative partner, its only other recourse to death, its existential approach to death, is to pursue his queer desire for sameness, for another male, for Victor. Victor chooses to construct a sexed and gendered male and by purposefully denying that creature his rightful avenue to reproduction, activates and amplifies the death drives lurking within both of them. This queer desire challenges Victor’s status as an enlightened subject imbued with scientific rationality and reason. Nonprocreative desire troubles the notion of an autonomous self. ‘As the death drive dissolves those congeal- ments of identity to permit us to know and survive as ourselves, so the queer must insist on disturbing, on queering social organizations as such’ (24). Both Victor and his creature rise to queer mythic positions as figures experiencing the ecstatic nature of the abject. This is the queer nonprocreative body living and dying ‘painfully and violently’.
This isn’t to suggest that queer bodies are more in tune with or more likely to experience violent and painful material states, but to propose that an abject queer body is less burdened by social orders that tend to deny the existence of such states. As Frankenstein continues to disturb, delight and inspire new generations of readers, we see how Shelley’s characters can be figured as queer and how that designation brings them closer to the mythical experience of dying. Death without progeny becomes a type of queer rapture.
The fullest extent of the sublime, according to Schopenhauer, is man’s realisation that he is merely a frail thought caught in ‘the battle of the raging elements’ (Schopenhauer [1819] 1909, 265). When man sees these most destructive tendencies of nature, he perceives himself as ‘the frail phenomenon of will, which the slightest touch of these forces can utterly destroy’ (265). Victor becomes one of those destructive forces. He becomes a phantasm that can both create life and tear it apart. But what he creates is wrought from supernatural desire and from supernatural forces. Schopenhauer’s sublime works only as it is viewed emanating from outside the individual. ‘This is the complete impression of the sublime. Here he obtains a glimpse of a power beyond all comparison superior to the individual, threatening it with annihilation’ (265). Shelley’s text produces horror by investing this fantastic power in Victor’s mortal person. He tears apart the sutured female flesh of a reproductive partner as the creature watches. Revealing that nothing in nature is inert (cue Bennett’s vital materiality), the only activity left for the creature, his only recourse to death, is to destroy. ‘The creature becomes the measure of Victor’s abjection’ (Haggerty 2006 55).
Queer desire returns to Victor on his wedding night. After the creature kills Elizabeth, Victor is also no longer one half of a procreative relationship. A queer sublime lingers, which produces an abject awareness of matter as it acts on immeasurably small material levels mostly ignored by human subjects.
...I heard a shrill and dreadful scream. It came from the room in which Elizabeth had retired. As I heard it, the whole truth rushed into my mind, my arms dropped, the motion of every muscle and fibre was suspended; I could feel the blood trickling in my veins, and tingling in the extremities of my limbs. (Shelley [1818] 1994, 207)
A queer experience of death excites matter on the smallest scale and produces a sublime material experience. The sublime’s ‘immeasurable greatness dwindles the individual to
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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 69
nothing’ (Schopenhauer [1819] 1909, 265). Queer desire is the desire to embrace the
nothingness of the nonprocreative individual. ‘It is the transcending of our own indivi-
duality, the sense of the sublime’ (266). Transcending the individual, this desire for
sameness and the need to see inside and dissect the self are topics taken up by Georges
Bataille and can further help us understand how Shelley’s text resists heteronormativity’s
impulse to deny the power of matter coming apart and changing form.
The Jesuve jerks off
Georges Bataille ([1930] 1985) in his essay ‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh’ explores the importance of personal mutilation and sacrifice, personal or animal, to the human experience. When we are repulsed or find repugnant violent actions that cause a tearing of flesh or the eruption of bodily fluids – vomiting or the evacuation of the bowels – we experience a release. ‘Repugnance is only one form of the stupor caused by a horrifying eruption, by the disgorging of a force that threatens to consume’ (70). Personal debasement and a rupture of our own ‘personal homogeneity’ is a constant occurrence – vomiting, cuts and bruises, bleeding, a pooping pope. Bataille explores the desire to worship this force and how we might rearrange our mythic relation- ships with it.
The person who sacrifices is free—free to indulge in a similar disgorging, free, continuously identifying with the victim, to vomit his own being just as he has vomited a piece of himself, in other words to throw himself outside of himself. (70)
Ritual human sacrifice and body mutilation are ways the human self addresses its own demise. These sacrificial acts remind us of the ultimate decay of the physical form and allow the worshipers to throw off the anxiety and the pressure of procreation. Worshipping the mutilated body of a dying Christ, reading the bloody entrails of a sacrificial lamb, or Victor tearing apart a female body meant as a companion and procreative partner are all worshipful acts that venerate the most destructive aspect of the sublime. They are anti-procreative, anti-self and materially queer. These ritual ten- dencies showcase Schopenhauer’s sublime dwindling the individual to nothing.
From an overt material perspective, Bataille constructs his concept of the Jesuve. From his essay ‘Solar Anus’ ([1931] 1985), Bataille sees ‘the terrestrial globe covered with volcanoes which serves as its anus’ (8). In 1815, the year before Frankenstein was conceived, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history occurred in Indonesia. Tambora threw so much volcanic ash into the atmosphere that the sun was blotted out for much of the following year. Snow fell on 4 July in Philadelphia, and Europe experienced a year without a summer. In 1816, outside Geneva Switzerland, Mary Shelley holed up in the Villa Diodati with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron through a summer with no sunshine, enduring only violent thunderstorms and dark, cold and wet days and nights. ‘Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails’ (8). The villa outside Geneva suffered the effects of the earth’s ejected entrails. We mention this fact to draw a direct causality between what the earth does with its jizz and how that matter influences human creativity. For our purposes, Bataille’s concept of the Jesuve, as it relates to the metaphor of the volcano, illustrates how contemporary mythologies continue to have powerful fascinations for burst bodies or ones that are queerly penetrated. The current melodramatic glut of vampire and zombie narratives attests to this fact.
The Jesuve jerks off
Georges Bataille ([1930] 1985) in his essay ‘Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh’ explores the importance of personal mutilation and sacrifice, personal or animal, to the human experience. When we are repulsed or find repugnant violent actions that cause a tearing of flesh or the eruption of bodily fluids – vomiting or the evacuation of the bowels – we experience a release. ‘Repugnance is only one form of the stupor caused by a horrifying eruption, by the disgorging of a force that threatens to consume’ (70). Personal debasement and a rupture of our own ‘personal homogeneity’ is a constant occurrence – vomiting, cuts and bruises, bleeding, a pooping pope. Bataille explores the desire to worship this force and how we might rearrange our mythic relation- ships with it.
The person who sacrifices is free—free to indulge in a similar disgorging, free, continuously identifying with the victim, to vomit his own being just as he has vomited a piece of himself, in other words to throw himself outside of himself. (70)
Ritual human sacrifice and body mutilation are ways the human self addresses its own demise. These sacrificial acts remind us of the ultimate decay of the physical form and allow the worshipers to throw off the anxiety and the pressure of procreation. Worshipping the mutilated body of a dying Christ, reading the bloody entrails of a sacrificial lamb, or Victor tearing apart a female body meant as a companion and procreative partner are all worshipful acts that venerate the most destructive aspect of the sublime. They are anti-procreative, anti-self and materially queer. These ritual ten- dencies showcase Schopenhauer’s sublime dwindling the individual to nothing.
From an overt material perspective, Bataille constructs his concept of the Jesuve. From his essay ‘Solar Anus’ ([1931] 1985), Bataille sees ‘the terrestrial globe covered with volcanoes which serves as its anus’ (8). In 1815, the year before Frankenstein was conceived, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history occurred in Indonesia. Tambora threw so much volcanic ash into the atmosphere that the sun was blotted out for much of the following year. Snow fell on 4 July in Philadelphia, and Europe experienced a year without a summer. In 1816, outside Geneva Switzerland, Mary Shelley holed up in the Villa Diodati with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron through a summer with no sunshine, enduring only violent thunderstorms and dark, cold and wet days and nights. ‘Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails’ (8). The villa outside Geneva suffered the effects of the earth’s ejected entrails. We mention this fact to draw a direct causality between what the earth does with its jizz and how that matter influences human creativity. For our purposes, Bataille’s concept of the Jesuve, as it relates to the metaphor of the volcano, illustrates how contemporary mythologies continue to have powerful fascinations for burst bodies or ones that are queerly penetrated. The current melodramatic glut of vampire and zombie narratives attests to this fact.
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70 E. Robertson
The term Jesuve is a remarkable linguist construction, one that David Ferrell Krell
(1995) dismantles and examines in his work Architecture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and
the Human Body. ‘The Jesuve is not only Jesus, but also seve, the sap of Dionysos.’ ‘The
Jesuve is both the volcano, Vesuve, and the goddess Venus.’ ‘It is the je subis, “I submit”,
of the French, and the yo subo, “I ascend”, of the Spanish. And so on, into a delirious
infinite’ (155). The concept of the Jesuve combines the destructive and the vulgar with the
beautiful and the creative. Bataille (as quoted by Krell 1995) describes it as that ‘bizarre
noise of kisses, prolonged on the flesh, clattered across the disgusting noise of entrails’
(157). The wet slurp of fleshy surfaces is a sound shared by a kissing couple and the
sucking, sickly noise of entrails being pulled from a human cavity. Victor is engaged in
the movement of entrails. He hears that ‘bizarre noise’ and, according to Bataille,
experiences a type of passion akin to that of erotic love. ‘The Jesuve is thus the image
of an erotic movement that burglarizes the images contained in the mind, giving them the
force of a scandalous eruption’ (Bataille [1931] 1985, 8). The sound of Victor tearing
apart the flesh of the female companion is the sound of a passionate kiss; of parted,
penetrated lips, and tongues lubricated by saliva – all fleshy protrusions penetrating open
body cavities. Both these acts are, in essence and in mechanical process, very similar. The
penetrating tongue and the passionate urge to kiss can lead to procreation, but the same
penetrative impulse can be ‘burglarised’, re-contextualised, and shipped out by the Jesuve
causing a psychic eruption (in Victor’s case, the urge to dismember). ‘In opposition to
celestial fertility there are terrestrial disasters, the image of terrestrial love without condi-
tion, erection without escape and without rule, scandal and terror’ (9). Queer desire is a
passion, a ‘terrestrial love without condition’, without monogamy, without social contract,
without procreative intent or remorse. It can be said the desire Victor and the creature have
for one another is this ‘opposition to celestial fertility’. There is an aversion to, an anxiety
for, and a rejection of heterosexual, procreative sexuality. Their relationship ends, most
definitely, as a ‘terrestrial disaster’. ‘The earth sometimes jerks off in a frenzy and
everything collapses on its surface’ (8).
The queer sublime is a scandalous eruption, which produces the ecstasy of dissolution and reunites the constituents of temporarily organised states of matter with the elemental Universe. This is the ecstatic benediction of Victor’s queer creature. ‘I shall ascend my funeral pier triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. I shall be at peace’ (Shelley [1818] 1994, 237).
Trier’s melancholic erotica
The erotic nature of the abject nonprocreative self finds an updated expression in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). The struggle with the abject self in Frankenstein arises as the unintended consequence of creating life outside the bounds of heterosexuality. This is an encounter Victor does not court consciously. Trier’s lead character Justine voluntarily leaves her marriage, her role as a potential mother and her successful job as an advertising executive. She chooses an abject state that seeks neither self-identification nor replication. This activates the psychic manifestation of the Jesuve, which destabilises Justine’s emo- tional make-up and causes a debilitating mental illness. As an abject, she prepares the way for the collision of Earth with the rogue planet Melancholia. She channels a kind of erotic rapture through immanent material rupture. This is the Kristevan abject, which Dino Felluga (2011) assesses as a state that ‘is associated with the eruption of the Real into our lives’ (Felluga 2011).
The queer sublime is a scandalous eruption, which produces the ecstasy of dissolution and reunites the constituents of temporarily organised states of matter with the elemental Universe. This is the ecstatic benediction of Victor’s queer creature. ‘I shall ascend my funeral pier triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. I shall be at peace’ (Shelley [1818] 1994, 237).
Trier’s melancholic erotica
The erotic nature of the abject nonprocreative self finds an updated expression in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). The struggle with the abject self in Frankenstein arises as the unintended consequence of creating life outside the bounds of heterosexuality. This is an encounter Victor does not court consciously. Trier’s lead character Justine voluntarily leaves her marriage, her role as a potential mother and her successful job as an advertising executive. She chooses an abject state that seeks neither self-identification nor replication. This activates the psychic manifestation of the Jesuve, which destabilises Justine’s emo- tional make-up and causes a debilitating mental illness. As an abject, she prepares the way for the collision of Earth with the rogue planet Melancholia. She channels a kind of erotic rapture through immanent material rupture. This is the Kristevan abject, which Dino Felluga (2011) assesses as a state that ‘is associated with the eruption of the Real into our lives’ (Felluga 2011).
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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 71
Justine rejects a feminine procreative sexuality, which activates a scandalous, Jesuvian
eruption of psychic energy that temporarily paralyses her. She falls into a near catatonic
state and is unable to care for herself. But as the planet draws closer to the earth, the erotic
energy of this pending cosmic collision energises her and Justine is able to function.
Trier’s narrative begins with a lush, extravagant wedding and ends with the annihila- tion of the earth. Justine’s wedding is attended by every sort of white privileged mal- content one can imagine – bitter divorced parents, corrupt heads of ad agencies, arrogant husbands and hired help, on the grounds of what looks like a Tuscan palace. But the material world in this film extends far beyond table linens and expensive landscaping. Trier’s nature includes the cosmos. This extended view brings into focus just how nature is able to ‘dwindle the individual to nothing’. Trier’s nature includes a type of destructive cosmic sublime, which, in the form of a planetary collision, turns all feeble human procreative intent into rubble – moms and dads and offspring turned into space junk.
As Justine weathers her psychotic break, brought on from her rejection of both marriage and a life of wealth and excess, her body responds not with a joyous recovery, but with a type of erotic wonder. She realises (makes Real) the vulnerability of her human body. In a crucially explicit scene from the movie, she spreads her naked body out on a small outcropping of rock along a stream. Her body is bathed in the silky blue glow generated from Melancholia as it makes its final approach to earth. Trier’s camera captures Justine’s fingers falling delicately across her breasts and over her white skin. This is not just the ecstasy of a slow life-long decay, but the rapture of total atomisation. This shot shows the viewer the delicate human miracle that is this soft liquid, 80-year sojourn of the most impossibly small and improbable of cosmic configurations.
Justine’s sister, Claire, follows her through the dark woods and comes upon her naked and rapt. But Claire has a small boy to take care of. She is already locked into a symbolic order that demands the care and attention for a procreative object. Claire is subjugated by what Edelman (2004) calls a ‘conservatism of the ego’, which compels the procreative subject to endorse a ‘reproductive futurism that perpetuates as reality a fantasy frame intended to secure the survival of the social in the Imaginary form of the Child’ (21). Claire’s ego cannot let go of the object that both defines her and blinds her to alternative ways of coping with material disaster.
Claire cannot conceive of the event that is transpiring. There must be somewhere safe where someone has an escape planned or can push back Melancholia’s advance. Reason tells her that the event at hand is grave but also inconceivable. She is a subject made by the desire for the continuance of her procreative object, without which, there is no life at all. ‘We are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of a future, than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child’ (Edelman 2004, 18). Faced with such a conundrum, Claire’s subjected mind turns feral and panic sets in. She faces the loss of her own life, but, what is worse, the loss of her genetic material – her objet petit a.3 Her son
as viewed through the prism of tears that it always calls forth, the figure of the Child seems to shimmer with the iridescent promise of Noah’s rainbow, serving like the rainbow as a pledge of a covenant that shields us against the persistent threat of apocalypse now – or later. (25)
The view of her sister accepting this apocalypse with an erotic resolve causes additional psychic disturbance and Claire begins to search frantically for ways to stay alive.
Justine releases herself from the desire for any object that would bring her subject status. She cares nothing for the further acquisition of knowledge or professional
Trier’s narrative begins with a lush, extravagant wedding and ends with the annihila- tion of the earth. Justine’s wedding is attended by every sort of white privileged mal- content one can imagine – bitter divorced parents, corrupt heads of ad agencies, arrogant husbands and hired help, on the grounds of what looks like a Tuscan palace. But the material world in this film extends far beyond table linens and expensive landscaping. Trier’s nature includes the cosmos. This extended view brings into focus just how nature is able to ‘dwindle the individual to nothing’. Trier’s nature includes a type of destructive cosmic sublime, which, in the form of a planetary collision, turns all feeble human procreative intent into rubble – moms and dads and offspring turned into space junk.
As Justine weathers her psychotic break, brought on from her rejection of both marriage and a life of wealth and excess, her body responds not with a joyous recovery, but with a type of erotic wonder. She realises (makes Real) the vulnerability of her human body. In a crucially explicit scene from the movie, she spreads her naked body out on a small outcropping of rock along a stream. Her body is bathed in the silky blue glow generated from Melancholia as it makes its final approach to earth. Trier’s camera captures Justine’s fingers falling delicately across her breasts and over her white skin. This is not just the ecstasy of a slow life-long decay, but the rapture of total atomisation. This shot shows the viewer the delicate human miracle that is this soft liquid, 80-year sojourn of the most impossibly small and improbable of cosmic configurations.
Justine’s sister, Claire, follows her through the dark woods and comes upon her naked and rapt. But Claire has a small boy to take care of. She is already locked into a symbolic order that demands the care and attention for a procreative object. Claire is subjugated by what Edelman (2004) calls a ‘conservatism of the ego’, which compels the procreative subject to endorse a ‘reproductive futurism that perpetuates as reality a fantasy frame intended to secure the survival of the social in the Imaginary form of the Child’ (21). Claire’s ego cannot let go of the object that both defines her and blinds her to alternative ways of coping with material disaster.
Claire cannot conceive of the event that is transpiring. There must be somewhere safe where someone has an escape planned or can push back Melancholia’s advance. Reason tells her that the event at hand is grave but also inconceivable. She is a subject made by the desire for the continuance of her procreative object, without which, there is no life at all. ‘We are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of a future, than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the Child’ (Edelman 2004, 18). Faced with such a conundrum, Claire’s subjected mind turns feral and panic sets in. She faces the loss of her own life, but, what is worse, the loss of her genetic material – her objet petit a.3 Her son
as viewed through the prism of tears that it always calls forth, the figure of the Child seems to shimmer with the iridescent promise of Noah’s rainbow, serving like the rainbow as a pledge of a covenant that shields us against the persistent threat of apocalypse now – or later. (25)
The view of her sister accepting this apocalypse with an erotic resolve causes additional psychic disturbance and Claire begins to search frantically for ways to stay alive.
Justine releases herself from the desire for any object that would bring her subject status. She cares nothing for the further acquisition of knowledge or professional
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72 E. Robertson
advancement or progeny. Justine’s abjection is the erotic sensation of energised meat
without an object of desire. There is no joy, just the abject sensation of Schopenhauer’s
queer sublime dwindling the individual to nothing. Justine exists in a queer body that will
surely die and only has the flesh on hand with which to organise one final ontological
breath. And why shouldn’t that breath be erotic – cosmically so?
At the conclusion of the film there is a union of two bodies – the earth into Melancholia. Surely bits of Claire will mingle with bits of Justine. At the collision event, the sisters and the boy hold hands beneath a triad of sticks Justine erects. Claire thrashes in a fit of existential horror. The boy is numb. Justine is calm, not joyous, but ecstatically resigned. She is Edelman’s (2004) paramour, one last human signifier full of sound and fury signifying nothing(ness). ‘And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us, is this willingness to insist intransitively – to insist that the future stop here’ (35). Justine’s calm nonprocreative insistence is a type of queer ecological ritual participating in the rapturous conclusion of the earth’s long glorious life.
Trier shows the viewer how Justine in many ways is as monstrous as Victor’s creature – not physically, but certainly psychologically. She has been socially cobbled together by the monstrous extravagance of her privileged life, by a bitter callous mother, an indifferent, uninvolved father, and the megalomaniacal executive about to make her a partner in his advertising firm. If Frankenstein’s creature is the example of Victor’s own abject desire for the self, Justine is the abject Realisation of a relentless procreative human culture that cannot bear the thought of its own demise. The wedded white virgin poised for reproductive success is the symbol that keeps the culture from looking at death. The rejection of that symbol by the female herself can be as disturbing as a male scientist tearing apart that feminine body. The abject female body interrupts, figuratively, the procreative process of all humanity. Justine’s perfectly able yet voluntarily queer body is compelled to live its own dying erotically and unflinchingly. She consciously chooses her abject state, which invites the violent transformative power of Bataille’s Jesuve. This is the experience of becoming abject. In this state, Justine finds Eros in the annihilation of worlds.
So, matter, what’s new?
We’ve examined a small slice of a pie we could call new queer materialism. Do we dare? We’ve looked at how a material state, nonprocreativity, finds its way into two different mythic structures. But if we were to turn around and look in the opposite direction, it becomes more difficult to see what these mythic figures might do to human bodies and their habitats. At this juncture, it may be presumptively inappropriate to provide some practical ecological suggestions for queer bodies. If you’re queer please don’t procreate because an embattled earth needs a break from babies. This may be a materially sound idea, but it rings ethically dubious. A queer nonprocreative socio-ecological ethos may exist too far outside the imperatives of current political praxis regarding queer lives. There’s a lot of politicking left to do. But thinking such dark ecological thoughts remains too powerful an urge to resist. To what figural material positions could queer bodies ascend? Do they keep their eyes on the heavens and prepare ways to help people meet their own violent ends? Are queer bodies the new prophets of doom?
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands from her work ‘Melancholy natures, queer ecologies’ (2010), hints at how queer bodies may help refigure stories of habitat loss and biological reordering. Mortimer-Sandilands’ idea for a type of queer melancholia focuses on the experience of AIDS as a force that had the capacity to rewrite the relationship between the subject and its objects of desire by implementing a queer remembering which challenges
At the conclusion of the film there is a union of two bodies – the earth into Melancholia. Surely bits of Claire will mingle with bits of Justine. At the collision event, the sisters and the boy hold hands beneath a triad of sticks Justine erects. Claire thrashes in a fit of existential horror. The boy is numb. Justine is calm, not joyous, but ecstatically resigned. She is Edelman’s (2004) paramour, one last human signifier full of sound and fury signifying nothing(ness). ‘And so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us, is this willingness to insist intransitively – to insist that the future stop here’ (35). Justine’s calm nonprocreative insistence is a type of queer ecological ritual participating in the rapturous conclusion of the earth’s long glorious life.
Trier shows the viewer how Justine in many ways is as monstrous as Victor’s creature – not physically, but certainly psychologically. She has been socially cobbled together by the monstrous extravagance of her privileged life, by a bitter callous mother, an indifferent, uninvolved father, and the megalomaniacal executive about to make her a partner in his advertising firm. If Frankenstein’s creature is the example of Victor’s own abject desire for the self, Justine is the abject Realisation of a relentless procreative human culture that cannot bear the thought of its own demise. The wedded white virgin poised for reproductive success is the symbol that keeps the culture from looking at death. The rejection of that symbol by the female herself can be as disturbing as a male scientist tearing apart that feminine body. The abject female body interrupts, figuratively, the procreative process of all humanity. Justine’s perfectly able yet voluntarily queer body is compelled to live its own dying erotically and unflinchingly. She consciously chooses her abject state, which invites the violent transformative power of Bataille’s Jesuve. This is the experience of becoming abject. In this state, Justine finds Eros in the annihilation of worlds.
So, matter, what’s new?
We’ve examined a small slice of a pie we could call new queer materialism. Do we dare? We’ve looked at how a material state, nonprocreativity, finds its way into two different mythic structures. But if we were to turn around and look in the opposite direction, it becomes more difficult to see what these mythic figures might do to human bodies and their habitats. At this juncture, it may be presumptively inappropriate to provide some practical ecological suggestions for queer bodies. If you’re queer please don’t procreate because an embattled earth needs a break from babies. This may be a materially sound idea, but it rings ethically dubious. A queer nonprocreative socio-ecological ethos may exist too far outside the imperatives of current political praxis regarding queer lives. There’s a lot of politicking left to do. But thinking such dark ecological thoughts remains too powerful an urge to resist. To what figural material positions could queer bodies ascend? Do they keep their eyes on the heavens and prepare ways to help people meet their own violent ends? Are queer bodies the new prophets of doom?
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands from her work ‘Melancholy natures, queer ecologies’ (2010), hints at how queer bodies may help refigure stories of habitat loss and biological reordering. Mortimer-Sandilands’ idea for a type of queer melancholia focuses on the experience of AIDS as a force that had the capacity to rewrite the relationship between the subject and its objects of desire by implementing a queer remembering which challenges
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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 73
the politics of mourning. Society (and by society, I mean Sigmund Freud) says get over it –
mourn your ecological loss properly by focusing on some other object. Mortimer-
Sandilands suggests the apathy towards the degradation of global habitats is reinforced by
the transference of desire from lost ecological objects to new, shinier and more promising
objects like green technologies and, in particular, eco-tourism. These objects are designed to
fetishise and capitalise on ‘undisturbed places’, which provide the hope of a greener future
as a way to avoid living with worldwide destruction as an ecological reality. Mortimer-
Sandilands concludes that we haven’t properly mourned a rapidly changing planet yet
because we don’t really know what we’re losing.
Queer melancholia, for Sandilands, never gets over loss. It never moves on to some- thing else or never forgets. It always remembers and lives with the busted pieces. She asks this big question:
What would it mean to consider seriously the environmental present, in explicit contrast to dominant discourses of ecological modernization, as a pile of environmental wreckage, constituted and haunted by multiple, personal, and deeply traumatic losses rather than as a position from which to celebrate their demise by consuming them (and moving on to something else)? (Mortimer-Sandilands 2010, 342)
She highlights Derek Jarman’s memoir Modern Nature and analyses his writings as ecological meditations on biological fracturing and the loss of life, not as celebrations for more objects to come, but as permanent queer remembrances that live with decay by attaching memories to broken pieces. Mortimer-Sandilands (2010) imagines his process. ‘This present moment leads me to this past fragment; this plant or motion or event reminds me of him on this day’ (353). For insistent heterosexuality, productive Freudian mourning concentrates on replacing the lost object of desire with some new thing. Queer melancholia refuses that process and chooses this permanent state of remembrance where queer broken bodies act as symbols that motivate social and political activism. ‘The sexual, political past thus remains inside the melancholic present’ (353). Mortimer- Sandilands suggests this type of fractured remembering connects Jarman to an actively engaged ecology, which does not run from disruption or try to reinvent something better. This is an ecological awareness that sits with the mess humans have made. It confronts the poop the party has left behind. Mortimer-Sandilands imagines this queer melancholia as ‘a psychic state of being that holds the possibility for memory’s transformation into ethical and political environmental reflection’ (354).
Though it is an ethical imperative to maintain awareness of the political and ethical injustices that plague the gay community, particularly regarding the generation most affected by AIDS, it is unclear to what ecological ends these reflections aspire. The political force brought to bear by the AIDS epidemic unquestionably led to more social participation, but this perceived equity is conditional. Society tells the LGBT community, live like us economically and you’ll be given parity. Has this normalisation, gained through the efforts of queer political groups, really brought to pass any change in human ecology? I ask this question not to suggest that normalisation has been the only goal for queer politics, but to note that it is one of the unintended consequences. It is possible that the socialisation of queer bodies, post-AIDS, is running away too hastily from a serious and reflective time-out to discuss, in terms of human ecology, what queer bodies are as material agents. Are there benefits to taking a step beyond human politics to use the queer body to change the way we view matter itself? Edelman (2004) prods us to take that step.
Queer melancholia, for Sandilands, never gets over loss. It never moves on to some- thing else or never forgets. It always remembers and lives with the busted pieces. She asks this big question:
What would it mean to consider seriously the environmental present, in explicit contrast to dominant discourses of ecological modernization, as a pile of environmental wreckage, constituted and haunted by multiple, personal, and deeply traumatic losses rather than as a position from which to celebrate their demise by consuming them (and moving on to something else)? (Mortimer-Sandilands 2010, 342)
She highlights Derek Jarman’s memoir Modern Nature and analyses his writings as ecological meditations on biological fracturing and the loss of life, not as celebrations for more objects to come, but as permanent queer remembrances that live with decay by attaching memories to broken pieces. Mortimer-Sandilands (2010) imagines his process. ‘This present moment leads me to this past fragment; this plant or motion or event reminds me of him on this day’ (353). For insistent heterosexuality, productive Freudian mourning concentrates on replacing the lost object of desire with some new thing. Queer melancholia refuses that process and chooses this permanent state of remembrance where queer broken bodies act as symbols that motivate social and political activism. ‘The sexual, political past thus remains inside the melancholic present’ (353). Mortimer- Sandilands suggests this type of fractured remembering connects Jarman to an actively engaged ecology, which does not run from disruption or try to reinvent something better. This is an ecological awareness that sits with the mess humans have made. It confronts the poop the party has left behind. Mortimer-Sandilands imagines this queer melancholia as ‘a psychic state of being that holds the possibility for memory’s transformation into ethical and political environmental reflection’ (354).
Though it is an ethical imperative to maintain awareness of the political and ethical injustices that plague the gay community, particularly regarding the generation most affected by AIDS, it is unclear to what ecological ends these reflections aspire. The political force brought to bear by the AIDS epidemic unquestionably led to more social participation, but this perceived equity is conditional. Society tells the LGBT community, live like us economically and you’ll be given parity. Has this normalisation, gained through the efforts of queer political groups, really brought to pass any change in human ecology? I ask this question not to suggest that normalisation has been the only goal for queer politics, but to note that it is one of the unintended consequences. It is possible that the socialisation of queer bodies, post-AIDS, is running away too hastily from a serious and reflective time-out to discuss, in terms of human ecology, what queer bodies are as material agents. Are there benefits to taking a step beyond human politics to use the queer body to change the way we view matter itself? Edelman (2004) prods us to take that step.
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74
E. Robertson
If the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity, if the jouissance, the
corrosive enjoyment, intrinsic to queer (non)identity annihilates the fetishistic jouissance that
works to consolidate identity by allowing reality to coagulate around its ritual reproduction,
then the only oppositional status to which our queerness could ever lead would depend on our
taking seriously the place of the death drive we’re called on to figure, insisting, against the
cult of the Child and the political order it enforces, that we, as Guy Hocquenghem made clear,
are, ‘not the signifier of what might become the new form of “social organization,” ’ that we
do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all of these fantasies
reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future. (35)
Because Edelman presses us to see queerness as expressly nonprocreative, the future becomes, possibly, nonexistent for human beings, thus eliminating the object petit a – ‘a brighter tomorrow’ – and, along with it, the anxiety surrounding its potential loss. Even Derek Jarman’s garden, fractured and in pieces but still full of memory and political hope as his queer remembering challenges how natural spaces are conceived and to what political or ideological ends they aspire, is still caught in a cycle of not getting over, not forgetting objects of desire.
As supplements to Jarman’s Modern Nature, which expresses the resilience of a resistant queer cultural community ‘in which sex, death, and nature manage to cohabit with some political force’ (Mortimer-Sandilands 2010, 351), Justine and Victor, as nonprocreative bodies, stand as mythic figures within a system in which sex, death, and nature manage to cohabit with a destructive force. This abject layer reveals itself when we peel back the queer political skin. This suggests a move deeper into materiality, beneath queer politicking, as a way to further consider how and why we mourn material spaces. A queer nonprocreative materialism sees every human life as a temporarily organised state of matter and thus, any life, queerly mourned or not, is still a contingent material thing that transcends every human attempt to make sense of its decay. These are complimentary recourses to death. The queer body can be both a political tool, and also an abject material state from which creative mythical figures emerge which may put us in closer contact with Bennett’s vibrant matter, which cares nothing at all how humans mourn the loss of life. Have death and (re)birth become too political for them to be helpful life markers within a healthy ecological mythos?4
As necessary as queer politicking is and will be for the foreseeable future, viewing nonprocreative bodies as abject, temporarily organised states of matter released from memory and objects of desire, whether that be the Child or some new social order, may put us into closer contact with expanded mythic possibilities. Such a mythos focuses on human bodies as unique collections of vibrant matter and is less concerned with evaluat- ing humans as exceptional ecological figures. Just what are the creative or mythic implications of living in bodies that will surely die without leaving anything behind? Abject erotica opens a dark window onto a view of Schopenhauer’s great dwindling. The advantage of this type of eroticism may be that there is no loss to suffer. The queer sublime, in that it can be associated with vital materiality, ‘better captures an “alien” quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman’ (Bennett 2010, 112, emphasis in original). There is nothing lost. There is just the ecstatic witnessing of matter changing states. ‘My “own” body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human’ (112). And so how we mourn the loss of matter that is not exclusively ours to begin with is of little consequence.
But doesn’t this just give humans carte blanche to continue destroying earthly habitats? If there is no loss to lament then what should it matter if fossil fuel consumption,
Because Edelman presses us to see queerness as expressly nonprocreative, the future becomes, possibly, nonexistent for human beings, thus eliminating the object petit a – ‘a brighter tomorrow’ – and, along with it, the anxiety surrounding its potential loss. Even Derek Jarman’s garden, fractured and in pieces but still full of memory and political hope as his queer remembering challenges how natural spaces are conceived and to what political or ideological ends they aspire, is still caught in a cycle of not getting over, not forgetting objects of desire.
As supplements to Jarman’s Modern Nature, which expresses the resilience of a resistant queer cultural community ‘in which sex, death, and nature manage to cohabit with some political force’ (Mortimer-Sandilands 2010, 351), Justine and Victor, as nonprocreative bodies, stand as mythic figures within a system in which sex, death, and nature manage to cohabit with a destructive force. This abject layer reveals itself when we peel back the queer political skin. This suggests a move deeper into materiality, beneath queer politicking, as a way to further consider how and why we mourn material spaces. A queer nonprocreative materialism sees every human life as a temporarily organised state of matter and thus, any life, queerly mourned or not, is still a contingent material thing that transcends every human attempt to make sense of its decay. These are complimentary recourses to death. The queer body can be both a political tool, and also an abject material state from which creative mythical figures emerge which may put us in closer contact with Bennett’s vibrant matter, which cares nothing at all how humans mourn the loss of life. Have death and (re)birth become too political for them to be helpful life markers within a healthy ecological mythos?4
As necessary as queer politicking is and will be for the foreseeable future, viewing nonprocreative bodies as abject, temporarily organised states of matter released from memory and objects of desire, whether that be the Child or some new social order, may put us into closer contact with expanded mythic possibilities. Such a mythos focuses on human bodies as unique collections of vibrant matter and is less concerned with evaluat- ing humans as exceptional ecological figures. Just what are the creative or mythic implications of living in bodies that will surely die without leaving anything behind? Abject erotica opens a dark window onto a view of Schopenhauer’s great dwindling. The advantage of this type of eroticism may be that there is no loss to suffer. The queer sublime, in that it can be associated with vital materiality, ‘better captures an “alien” quality of our own flesh, and in so doing reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious) kinship between the human and the nonhuman’ (Bennett 2010, 112, emphasis in original). There is nothing lost. There is just the ecstatic witnessing of matter changing states. ‘My “own” body is material, and yet this vital materiality is not fully or exclusively human’ (112). And so how we mourn the loss of matter that is not exclusively ours to begin with is of little consequence.
But doesn’t this just give humans carte blanche to continue destroying earthly habitats? If there is no loss to lament then what should it matter if fossil fuel consumption,
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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 75
nuclear holocaust, or large scale forest depletion are the forces of change? This isn’t to
negate queer mourning and melancholia as political agents, but, more to the point,
to suggest that lamentation, queerly performed or not, may not be the only effective
way to reverse course. A great deal of letting go will be needed as radical environmental
change takes shape. A queer community of nonprocreative bodies could certainly help
navigate that existential shift.
I look to engage the work of the self-proclaimed eco-goth, Timothy Morton, as he has been sullying the pot of sunny environmentalism as of late. If the queer sublime finds an editorial position within Morton’s dark ecology (and I think it does), then the queer sublime enters into conversation with Morton’s ‘ecological thought’, which ‘includes negativity and irony, ugliness and horror’ (Morton 2010, 17). These truly ecological categories ‘are important, because they compel our compassionate coexistence to go beyond condescending pity’ (17). Morton points out that ‘it is no wonder that the ancients thought that melancholy, their word for depression, was the earth mood. In the language of humor theory, melancholy is black, earthy, and cold’ (16). For Morton, as well as for Trier’s Justine and Shelley’s queer scientist, loneliness caused by the separation from subjecting human procreative symbolic orders is an expressly undervalued ‘ecological aesthetic’. Morton asks these questions: ‘Is the dark experience of separateness from Earth a place where we can experience ecological awareness? Is loneliness a deep sign of connection?’ (16). Letting go may be a way to reimagine how we see our own contingent place among all matter, so we answer yes to both questions. Opening up to a queer sublime is not an excuse to turn a blind eye to our destructive habits, but an invitation to slow down and stop pushing so hard against the fear of death by constructing and consuming objects of desire in order to quell our terror of nonexistence. I concur with Morton that things are going to get worse before they get better. This isn’t pessimism, but a pronounced determination to ‘create frameworks for coping with a catastrophe that, from the evidence of the hysterical announcements of its imminent arrival, has already occurred’ (17).
That rapture and rupture are so closely linked etymologically, differentiated by two arbitrary vowel sounds, reveals a collaborative relationship between dismemberments and transcendence. Bataille’s Jesuve is the movement between the two states, the constant ‘threat of scandalous eruption’. It is Tambora at the ready, Victor dismembering a female body, and Justine choosing an abject nonprocreative physical state and a psychic state full of black bile. The Jesuve is one heavenly body consuming another. The sublime space of the queer body revels in its own contingent materiality that moves in between states of being – one subjected by language, the other objected by its relationships to the forces of the cosmos.
In defining queer as nonprocreative, we’ve extended the designation beyond sexual orientation. The transgressive nature of gay sex, traditionally viewed as socially strange and unnatural, has been examined extensively by a host of queer theorists. Those views are challenged by Mortimer-Sandilands and the authors collected in Queer Ecologies to undo the damaging cultural prejudices that have marred queer lives. However, the advent of marriage equality laws helps neutralise the associations between alternative sexualities and what was once considered monstrous and unnatural. This current social zeitgeist actively seeks members of the gay community as inductees into a dominant procreative social order. Current homonormative social structures not only allow, but actively encou- rage surrogated reproduction via the use of groundbreaking fertility science involving gene splicing and stem cell manipulations – two methods that can also be classified as unnatural. These extended reproductive processes that are sanctioned scientifically and
I look to engage the work of the self-proclaimed eco-goth, Timothy Morton, as he has been sullying the pot of sunny environmentalism as of late. If the queer sublime finds an editorial position within Morton’s dark ecology (and I think it does), then the queer sublime enters into conversation with Morton’s ‘ecological thought’, which ‘includes negativity and irony, ugliness and horror’ (Morton 2010, 17). These truly ecological categories ‘are important, because they compel our compassionate coexistence to go beyond condescending pity’ (17). Morton points out that ‘it is no wonder that the ancients thought that melancholy, their word for depression, was the earth mood. In the language of humor theory, melancholy is black, earthy, and cold’ (16). For Morton, as well as for Trier’s Justine and Shelley’s queer scientist, loneliness caused by the separation from subjecting human procreative symbolic orders is an expressly undervalued ‘ecological aesthetic’. Morton asks these questions: ‘Is the dark experience of separateness from Earth a place where we can experience ecological awareness? Is loneliness a deep sign of connection?’ (16). Letting go may be a way to reimagine how we see our own contingent place among all matter, so we answer yes to both questions. Opening up to a queer sublime is not an excuse to turn a blind eye to our destructive habits, but an invitation to slow down and stop pushing so hard against the fear of death by constructing and consuming objects of desire in order to quell our terror of nonexistence. I concur with Morton that things are going to get worse before they get better. This isn’t pessimism, but a pronounced determination to ‘create frameworks for coping with a catastrophe that, from the evidence of the hysterical announcements of its imminent arrival, has already occurred’ (17).
That rapture and rupture are so closely linked etymologically, differentiated by two arbitrary vowel sounds, reveals a collaborative relationship between dismemberments and transcendence. Bataille’s Jesuve is the movement between the two states, the constant ‘threat of scandalous eruption’. It is Tambora at the ready, Victor dismembering a female body, and Justine choosing an abject nonprocreative physical state and a psychic state full of black bile. The Jesuve is one heavenly body consuming another. The sublime space of the queer body revels in its own contingent materiality that moves in between states of being – one subjected by language, the other objected by its relationships to the forces of the cosmos.
In defining queer as nonprocreative, we’ve extended the designation beyond sexual orientation. The transgressive nature of gay sex, traditionally viewed as socially strange and unnatural, has been examined extensively by a host of queer theorists. Those views are challenged by Mortimer-Sandilands and the authors collected in Queer Ecologies to undo the damaging cultural prejudices that have marred queer lives. However, the advent of marriage equality laws helps neutralise the associations between alternative sexualities and what was once considered monstrous and unnatural. This current social zeitgeist actively seeks members of the gay community as inductees into a dominant procreative social order. Current homonormative social structures not only allow, but actively encou- rage surrogated reproduction via the use of groundbreaking fertility science involving gene splicing and stem cell manipulations – two methods that can also be classified as unnatural. These extended reproductive processes that are sanctioned scientifically and
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76 E. Robertson
socially among the newly normative segments of the LGBT community may put that
community in danger of becoming ecologically unsound while being socially integrated.
(This statement, of course, assumes one takes the position that having fewer human
inhabitants slows the growth of habitat destruction.) Maybe being of a queer and
monstrous biology isn’t such a bad thing for the planet.
The excess queer eroticism we’ve explored in Frankenstein and Melancholia, if we maintain Bataille as one of our theoretical helmsmen, is expressed with the violent abundant release of energy without the prospect of return. For queerness to attain an association with Bennett’s vibrant materiality it must maintain its nonprocreativity lest it succumb, by necessity, to symbolic orders constructed to keep measurements of return – children, property, memory, new social orders – alive and at the centre of civic structures. The queer body is now becoming subject to the same procreative social structures that have girded and continue to support dangerous heteronormative consumptive and regen- erative practices.
To open this queer theoretical and material analysis to any type of nonprocreative body, we include sexualities of all kinds. This more material turn in the discussion of queerness places the ecological weight on reproductive practices and not solely on sexual expression. The kid’s the thing. Think of the horror at a New England Thanksgiving when the able-bodied, newly wed daughter announces she and her husband have chosen not to have children. Rejecting motherhood today can be as controversial as having sex with another woman has been in years past. Trier shows us how the erotic expressions of the nonprocreative heterosexual woman can be as disturbing as the lone homosexual lurking behind park benches searching for sex when night falls, has been in years past. Shelley shows us the monster inside our desire for death, while Trier shows us how monstrously erotic the straight girl who has everything and throws it all away, can be.
Notes
Eric Robertson is a professor of environmental humanities at Utah Valley University. His writing appears in the current issue of Dark Mountain and he is a contributing editor for the new humanities
The excess queer eroticism we’ve explored in Frankenstein and Melancholia, if we maintain Bataille as one of our theoretical helmsmen, is expressed with the violent abundant release of energy without the prospect of return. For queerness to attain an association with Bennett’s vibrant materiality it must maintain its nonprocreativity lest it succumb, by necessity, to symbolic orders constructed to keep measurements of return – children, property, memory, new social orders – alive and at the centre of civic structures. The queer body is now becoming subject to the same procreative social structures that have girded and continue to support dangerous heteronormative consumptive and regen- erative practices.
To open this queer theoretical and material analysis to any type of nonprocreative body, we include sexualities of all kinds. This more material turn in the discussion of queerness places the ecological weight on reproductive practices and not solely on sexual expression. The kid’s the thing. Think of the horror at a New England Thanksgiving when the able-bodied, newly wed daughter announces she and her husband have chosen not to have children. Rejecting motherhood today can be as controversial as having sex with another woman has been in years past. Trier shows us how the erotic expressions of the nonprocreative heterosexual woman can be as disturbing as the lone homosexual lurking behind park benches searching for sex when night falls, has been in years past. Shelley shows us the monster inside our desire for death, while Trier shows us how monstrously erotic the straight girl who has everything and throws it all away, can be.
Notes
-
There is certainly a wide range of topics in this collection that tackle issues outside politics. Diane
Chisholm’s analysis of the work of Ellen Meloy is of particular interest here. Chisholm sees in
Meloy’s work a ‘vitalism in which nonreproductive sex is a primary force of nature’ (2010, 360).
-
Here I refer to Lacan’s notion of the Real and equate that designation to a materiality that eludes
linguistic category.
-
Felluga (2011) points out how Kristeva’s abject exists outside object-oriented systems of desire
and their attendant symbolic orders. ‘Kristeva’s understanding of the “abject” provides a helpful
term to contrast to Lacan’s “object of desire” or the “objet petit a.” Whereas the objet petit a
allows a subject to coordinate his or her desires, thus allowing the symbolic order of meaning and
intersubjective community to persist, the abject “is radically excluded and,” as Kristeva explains,
“draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.” It is neither object nor subject; the abject
is situated, rather, at a place before we entered into the symbolic order’ (Felluga 2011).
-
Jane Bennett (2010) seems to suggest such an idea as she expresses her scepticism about how
we figure death; ‘...my hunch is that the image of death or thoroughly instrumentalized matter
feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’ (ix). How
we socially construct, then queerly reconstruct our figurations of death and decay, keeps us
tangled up in human politicking, which feeds our hubris ‘by preventing us from detecting
(seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating
around and within human bodies’ (ix).
Eric Robertson is a professor of environmental humanities at Utah Valley University. His writing appears in the current issue of Dark Mountain and he is a contributing editor for the new humanities
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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 77
journal Saltfront: Studies in Human Habit(at). He lives with his partner David Luna and their two
pit bull terriers Peggy and Mona and is currently completing his first novel, The Salted Earth. He is
a queer ecologist, an up-cycling junkie and a self-proclaimed American anti-exceptionalist.
References
Bataille, G. [1927–1939] 1985. Visions of Excess. ‘Solar Anus,’ Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh. Bloomington: University of Minnesota Press.
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Chisholm, D. 2010. “Biophilia, Creative Involution, and the Ecological Future of Queer Desire.” In
Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Edelman, L. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press. Felluga, D. 2011. “Modules on Kristeva: On the Abject.” In Introductory Guide to Critical Theory.
Lafayette, LA: Purdue University. Web. September 1, 2013.
Haggerty, G. E. 2006. Queer Gothic. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Print.
Kant, I. [1790] 2005. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. New York: Barnes and
Noble Books.
Krell, D. F. 1995. Architecture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body. Albany, NC: State
University of New York Press. Google Books, Web.
Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L. S. Roudiez. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Mortimer-Sandilands, C. 2010. “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies.” In Queer Ecologies: Sex,
Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mortimer-Sandilands, C., and B. Erickson, eds. 2010. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Politics, Nature,
Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Morton, T. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Phillips, D., and H. I. Sullivan. 2012. “Material Ecocriticism: Dirt, Waste, Bodies, Food, and Other
Matter.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19 (3): 445–447. Schopenhauer, A. [1819] 1909. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 1. Translated by R. B. Haldane and
J. Kemp. London: Ballantyne Press. Google Books, Web.
Schopenhauer, A. 2010. The Essential Schopenhauer, edited by W. Schirmacher. New York: Harper
Perennial.
Shelley, M. W. [1818] 1994. Frankenstein. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Von Trier, L., dir. 2011. Melancholia, performed by Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Motion
picture. Zentropa/Nordisk Films.
References
Bataille, G. [1927–1939] 1985. Visions of Excess. ‘Solar Anus,’ Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh. Bloomington: University of Minnesota Press.
Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Chisholm, D. 2010. “Biophilia, Creative Involution, and the Ecological Future of Queer Desire.” In
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