Gothic voices and spectral ecocriticism: Caryl Churchill, Daisy Johnson, and Michelle Paver go to the fens

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Voices are bubbling up out of the wet, sloshy soil of East Anglia’s fens in Daisy Johnson’s short story ‘Starver’. Whose voices are these: the voices of the eels who thrive in this landscape, the transcendent voice of capital-N Nature itself, or some other haunting and spectral presence? And what does it mean for humanity’s relation to the nonhuman world, and for ecocritical studies, if we tune into the surprisingly lucid gothic voices that seem in some manner preserved within and erupting out of the soil we live and work on?

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In this paper, I am especially interested in what happens when we engage not with the more-than-human world’s immaterial dimensions, especially the real or imagined voices in which it speaks. This talk argues that the gothic tradition associated with England’s fens offer an especially rich starting point for thinking about what we might call—as a complement to recent work in material ecocriticism—a spectral ecocriticism. The fen-set ecogothic stories of Caryl Churchill, Daisy Johnson, and Michelle Paver foreground the radical instabilities that characterise the watery landscapes—or loamy wetscapes—of the fens and the people who engage this world. In their works, human subjectivities are continually under threat as they become unwilling mouthpieces and ventriloquists for the fens’ entwined environmental and cultural histories. In this space, human subjects are literally forced to accommodate other subjectivities and speak in other voices, human and nonhuman. The wider aim of this paper, then, is to begin sketching out a critical framework that helps us think about encounters between human and nonhuman less at the level of materiality, and rather as they operate in ways more intangible, more spectral, more ghostly.

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Dr Jimmy Packham is a senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham, where he specialises in gothic literature and the literature of the sea. He is the author of Gothic Utterance (UWP 2021)—which examines, in an American context, the power and ethical imperatives summoned up by a wide array of gothic voices—and Gothic Coasts (CUP forthcoming)—a study of British and Irish shoreline in gothic literature and culture. He has also published articles and chapters on the oceanic gothic, the maritime writing of Herman Melville, the literature of whales and whaling, and the gothic coast. He is a co-convenor of the Haunted Shores Research Network, with Drs Emily Alder, Giulia Champion, and Joan Passey, with whom he has co-edited several publications. He is currently co-writing a cultural history of the seafloor with Laurence Publicover, and editing an edition of the Midland History journal on the ‘haunted Midlands’; he is part way through a research project on Britain’s gothic coastlines, of which this exploration of ‘fen gothic’ is a slippery off-shoot. He is on Twitter @jfpackham