Abstract
The centrality of slime to corporeal theory can hardly be overstated, and phobic responses to slime belie both the exceptionalism we claim as our birthright, on the one hand, and the realities of our bodily existence and experiences on the other. Slime threatens and enables our sense of corporeal identity; triggers horror and disgust (as well as playful delight in children and sexual arousal in adults); and sits firmly within an ecophobic understanding of agencies outside of ourselves. Gendered and threatening, slime is oddly ambivalent matter. It is the stuff of which Anthropocene ecoGothic dreams are made, matter well beyond our command that threatens us precisely because of the ineluctability of its agential presence in our lives.
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Notes
Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland explain in “Gothic Nature: An introduction” that uncontrollability and terror characterize the ecoGothic: “we see the ‘overwhelmingness’ of Nature reflected in the fact that canonical Gothic frequently associated with the sublime, an important precursor to Gothic Nature, which emphasises the awesome, exciting, and terrifying aspects of landscape” (2019, p. 3).
Since originally penning these words, I have thought it necessary to offer the term “Anthropocene ecoGothic” as a perhaps more precise description of the ecoGothic in the era of climate change (since ecoGothic need not necessarily be in the Anthropocene).
This sentence and some of the rest of the paragraph that follows appears in slightly different form in my “Ecophobia, the agony of water, and misogyny” (476).
Noël Carroll argues that there is a “tendency in horror novels and stories to describe monsters in terms of and to associate them with filth, decay, deterioration, slime and so on. The monster in horror fiction, that is, is not only lethal but—and this is of utmost significance—also disgusting” (Carroll 1990, p. 22).
I have often thought that the reason people are so fascinated by fountains has to do with control. Fountains offer the possibility of chaos, the threat of disorder in the very moment that they carefully choreograph every splash and movement of water. Like our childhood fascination with heavy snow and leaf-strewn autumnal streets that temporarily obscure human order, fountains remind us of natural agency (particularly of water), and it is a powerful and potentially deadly agency. Our control over water, it seems, is rarely complete and is often fraught with ambivalence. On my first visit to the Three Gorges Dam in 2008, the ambivalence of the visitors (Chinese and foreign) toward the massive structure hailed as a “taming of the Yangtze” was palpable, a taming that cost 200 lives in onsite casualties and displaced more than 1.2 million people.
Sartre has been accused of sexism in how he addresses slime. I take up this matter elsewhere (see “Ecophobia, the agony of water, and misogyny,” pp. 466–467 in particular).
Barbara Creed has written about horror and sexism in Alien in The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. While primarily psychoanalytic, Creed’s approach deals little with what she calls “the struggle between the subject and the abject” or “the site of this struggle—a struggle which literally takes place within the interior of and across the body.” She explains that “slime, bile, pus, vomit, urine, [and] blood” are all part of this struggle (Creed 1993, p. 40), but her discussion is very brief and is of The Exorcist, not Alien.
This sentence and the four that follow appear in Estok (2019a, p. 481).
Carol J. Adams argued long ago in The sexual politics of meat (1991) about the anatomizing gaze of patriarchy and how dismemberment and fragmentation of the body are fundamental to both pornography and the meat industry. The compelling cover of the book shows a beach towel featuring a naked woman whose body is mapped out like the diagram hanging in butcher shops of animals and their meat cuts—“rib,” “rump,” “breast,” and so on.
A body is a collection of pieces, of bits, of members, of zones, of states, of functions. Heads, hands and cartilage, burnings, smoothnesses, spurts, sleep, digestion, goose-bumps, excitation, breathing, digesting, reproducing, mending, saliva, synovia, twists, cramps, and beauty marks (My translation.).
Indeed, long before the so-called New Materialism appeared on the theoretical map, Baruch Spinoza explained that “bodies are distinguished from one another in terms of motion and rest, quickness and slowness, and not in respect to substance” (Spinoza 1955, p. 93). It is a position later echoed by Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari:
A body is not defined by the form that determines it nor as a determinate substance or subject nor by the organs it possesses or the functions it fulfills. On the plane of consistency, a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude). Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds. The credit goes to Spinoza for calling attention to these two dimensions of the Body, and for having defined the plane of Nature as pure longitude and latitude. Latitude and longitude are the two elements of a cartography (Delueze and Guattari 1987, p. 260).
The merger is as overwhelmingly improbable as would be the conception of a baby from a man having sex with the tailpipe of a pickup truck. The number of failures is nothing short of dizzying, and the successful merger itself is “so breathtakingly improbable that it has never been duplicated” (ibid.).
Geology professor Ross Large asks why “evolution remained stuck in primordial slime for a boring billion years” (Moore https://bionews-tx.com/news/2014/02/20/why-was-evolution-stuck-in-primordial-slime-for-a-boring-billion-years/). The length is actually much greater than a billion years, but one billion or two and a half billion are each a long delay. The reason for the long delay is has to do with the improbability of the merger between the bacterium and the archaeon.
See also Sparks and Honey (2013), References.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the double-first class discipline cluster “The Chinese Language and Literature and the Global Dissemination of Chinese Culture,” Sichuan University, China.
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Estok, S.C. Corporeality, hyper-consciousness, and the Anthropocene ecoGothic: slime and ecophobia. Neohelicon 47, 27–39 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00519-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-020-00519-0