1Blue fiction depicts the relationship between humans and water in its different forms and materialisations: “from oceans to . . . rivers, lakes, glaciers, and many other forms of water” (Mentz 1); ecogothic blue fiction portrays changes to water ecosystems through the prism of their fear-inducing potential. The ecogothic “emerges as a necessity to understand the evolution of the relationship between the human beings and the more than human in terms of fear” (Casado Presa and Junquera 10). Within the fast-growing field of blue literature, be it fiction or academic writing, water is increasingly understood as an ecosystem, including the many forms of life inhabiting it, from microorganisms to water creatures like jellyfish:
While earlier scholarship figured the ocean as a blank space or aqua nullius . . . the new work of critical ocean studies engages sea ontologies, figuring maritime space as a multispecies and embodied place in which the oceanic contours of the planet, including its submarine creatures, are no longer outside of the history of the human. (DeLoughrey 42)
2The traditional representation of the ocean as a space clearly separated from the land, controllable and exploitable, is questioned in the twenty-first century by what is known as the oceanic turn (32), which invites all disciplines to reinvent the ocean imaginaries in order to integrate notions of transcorporeality and of porosity, meaning a consciousness of the interconnectedness between water ecosystems and humans. New materialism, as a school of thought that rethinks the place of human existence, proposes a de-anthropocentric understanding of the world to favour a more ecocentric one, in which humans belong to the animal world, like many other species, and where no species, vegetal or animal, is superior to another. A proponent of new materialism, Jane Bennett has described matter, including water, as endowed with agency thanks to the terms of “vibrant matter” and “vital materiality.” Life is distributed in all bodies of water, the human body being no exception, and pollution caused by human activities populates these interconnected entities. “Transcorporeality is a new materialist and posthumanist sense of the human as substantially and perpetually interconnected with the flows of substances and the agencies of environments” (Alaimo 2). The movements of new materialism, blue humanities, and the ecogothic within ecocriticism, all emerging in the first decades of the twenty-first century, are part of a collective effort from academics and writer-activists to reconceptualise agency and belonging. They apprehend waterworlds as terraqueous, emphasising the porous liminality between water, land, and species, and crucially, in the case of the ecogothic, as a site of fear, where this permeable membrane allows contamination to flow between bodies of water.
3Polluted and affected by the planetary process of warming and acidification, “roughly seventy percent of the planet’s surface is covered by liquid and solid water” (Mentz 5). Most places on Earth are water ecosystems, and therefore, the protection of these is central to the well-being and survival of non-human and human animals. The climate emergency signals a necessity to renew humans’ conception of the ocean through “stories and narratives that augment and highlight the material interdependencies that run to and through the ocean” (Rae 130). In that sense, waterworlds are to be understood as an emotional and cognitive category which can be informed by knowledge from various sources, from science education to different forms of art such as fiction (Corbett and Clark; Bilandzic). One central question, thus, is how waterworlds are represented within contemporary fiction and how this may influence our understanding of them. In order to better comprehend polluted waterworlds through fiction, what needs to be brought to light in blue stories is “slow violence.” Defined by Rob Nixon in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, it is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all,” and it is wrought by “climate change . . . toxic drift . . . and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes” (2). The foregrounding of the slow violence of pollution in fiction may therefore be useful to render visible this phenomenon, which has been engendered by the progressive process of industrialisation since the nineteenth century, and which is still partly invisible in water: “A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects” (3).
4It is precisely this slow violence of pollution which is brought to the fore in the two blue ecogothic short stories analysed here. They were written by emerging British authors whose fiction focuses on marine ecosystems. “Smack” by Julia Armfield from the collection Salt Slow (2019), opens on the apparent banality of recurrent tides of jellyfish beached on the shore: “The jellyfish come with the morning—a great beaching, bodies black on sand” (1). Within the story, the main hypotheses for these occurrences are “global warming” and “toxic-waste disposal” (2). The protagonist, Nicola, suffers psychologically due to an ongoing divorce, and identifies more with the jellyfish than with other human characters who mistreat her and the marine animals. Like these creatures, Nicola empties of her vital substance, with no food and in a house without furniture. She projects to lie down among the jellyfish on the shore and to become a viscous hybrid by mixing her body with theirs. In “Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict” by Lucy Wood from the collection The Sing of the Shore (2018), interpersonal issues systematically remain in the background to allow space for the foregrounding of pollution on the beach and its effects on the main characters, retired couple Mary and Vincent. They observe the exponential multiplication on the shore of detritus coming from the sea. This causes an eco-anxiety which materialises in the physical symptom of accelerated heart rates. Despite Mary and Vincent’s colossal efforts to clean the beach by collecting waste and piling it up inside their house, they progressively realise that the en masse beaching of waste is unavoidable. Both short stories, therefore, focus on the effects of pollution on coastal ecosystems: pollution in the sea, making it uninhabitable for jellyfish (“Smack”), and detritus ceaselessly stranded on the shore (“Flotsam”).
5Far from being a mere background in these blue short stories, the slow violence of pollution is represented thanks to the arresting ecogothic imagery of plastic being pictured as a ghost of pollution always returning; main characters Mary and Nicola become human-detritus-hybrids by being exposed to pollution; and waters are animalised as being sick. The blue ecogothic is a literary mode that recycles the nineteenth-century gothic imagery of ghosts, hybrids, and sickness (among others) to provide vivid representations of the ecological angst surrounding ocean pollution. The marine ecogothic is one way to represent the unrepresentability of the slow violence of pollution as “the Gothic marine looms eerily, opening up new ways of seeing and knowing” (Probyn 1). The ecogothic examines how the “unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid” body “can be more meaningfully understood as a site of articulation for environmental and species identity.” What Del Principe means here is that the ecogothic functions as an invitation to adopt a non-anthropocentric position on ecosystems, by developing “a more inclusive lens” on “the role that the environment, species, and nonhumans play in the construction of monstrosity and fear” (1).
6This article analyses how these two blue ecogothic short stories depict the slow violence of pollution on characters’ lives in order to shift, thanks to vivid portrayals of monstrosity, the readers’ understanding of their place in their ecosystems from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric one. First, the blue ecogothic imagery deployed around ecospectrality, hybridity, and sickness is analysed. Second, the recycling of traditionally gothic modes of the uncanny, the weird, and the eerie in these ecogothic blue short stories to defamiliarise the reader from the seaside is explained. Third, it is argued that the blue ecogothic imagery and modes facilitate, once the reader is defamiliarised from the anthropocentric seaside imagery, an ecocentric reappraisal of humans’ place within marine ecosystems.
- 1 The italics are from me to highlight the sounds and are not present in the original text.
7In the contemporary blue short story, the gothic tropes of ghosts, hybrids, and sickness are reinvested with the ecological angst that characterises the twenty-first century. According to Darryl Jones, “Contemporary fears of global warming and ecological catastrophe have produced a post-millennial wave of ecohorrors” (21). In particular, the figure of the ghost is used in relation to pollution—once into the sea, it inevitably makes its return on the land, highlighting the spatial liminality between sea and coast as a “permeable membrane” (35), which is itself a trope of horror. In that sense, the terraqueous ontology of coastal ecosystems makes them vulnerable to contamination by pollution: “Everyday, ostensibly benign, human stuff becomes nightmarish as it floats forever in the sea. The recognition that objects intended for momentary human use pollute for eternity renders them surreally malevolent” (Alaimo 487). In “Flotsam” by Lucy Wood, plastic pollution beaching on the shore is the spectral embodiment of consumerism, underlying a system which incites the purchase of plastic containers as if once produced and used, they could disappear. This story displays how, on the contrary, detritus endlessly multiplies as if forever and uncontrollably producing doubles of itself. As a sort of dopplegänger haunting the shore, the ceaseless apparition of waste in the sea and on the beach is a spectral clone, a ghostly twin, of the infinite production and consumption of it in society. After Mary has found and hidden one blue plastic bottle on the beach, “[the] next morning there [are] five bottles strewn across the rocks below the house” (111). This spectral presence of plastic is reinforced by sounds reminiscent of ghosts: “The wind knocked one of the bottles over and it fell with a hollow thud. Another one blew back towards the sand. Mary watched it moving. It made a scraping sound as it skidded against the gravel” (112).1 The plastic that comes from the ocean recalls the ghosts of fiction influenced by the gothic, such as Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, with the motif of the hand—Cathy’s in Wuthering Heights—attempting to penetrate houses: “There was a rubber glove pressing against the downstairs window” (118). The plastic ghosts, endowed with a counter-intuitive agency, are evocative, for Mary, of the fauna they endanger: “packets flapped on the ground like injured birds” (118). The spectral permanence of the detritus haunts Mary: “Mary closed her eyes but still saw the shapes on the backs of her eyelids” (118). The phenomenon of persistence of vision forces her to still see it once her eyes are closed. Plastic packaging, therefore, becomes a vision of horror when it floats on the ocean and flows onto beaches, and Wood’s depiction of detritus coming back from the sea in the shape of an ecospectre is a symbolic representation of this. It is emotionally and cognitively impactful because it endows plastic pollution with the already existing imagery of the haunting figure of the ghost. In this respect, it engages the reader in the processual stage of conceptualising plastic pollution as inevitably returning into one’s life, after it has been thrown away. It is therefore a strong image meant to increase ecological awareness on the use of plastic: “intense images, generated in the process of reading, influence interpretations and are more likely to be retained in memory” (Brosch 95). This image of the ghost is also used in “Smack,” where the jellyfish beached on the shore are “translucent, almost spectral, as though the sea has exorcised its ghosts” (127). The jellyfish are depicted as oceanic ghosts, but they are also the spectres of the consumerist society polluting the seas and rendering the waters uninhabitable for the jellyfish. Pollutants, sometimes invisible in water, disperse and infiltrate bodies of water like the jellyfish: like ghosts, they know no boundaries. In ecogothic blue short fiction, the gothic figure of the ghost is therefore reinvested with the angst of the twenty-first century: the spectral pollution is what haunts and returns. Pollution, like ghosts, has the characteristic of moving through spaces and temporalities:
As a force that operates between the visible and the invisible, the corporeal and the incorporeal, haunting . . . specters open possibilities for perception by traveling across boundaries used to separate time, space, and species. . . . They bring the limits of visual epistemologies to awareness . . . and cultivate affective engagement, providing readers with an alternative way of knowing that relocates the human in relation to varied scales of interdependence and makes the claims of a range of human and nonhuman others tangible. (White 2)
Ecospectres represent within blue short fiction the social needs of the time to diminish water pollution and prevent endangering waterworlds. Pollutants haunt these blue short stories, which in turn function as a warning for readers to become more conscious about the pollution they produce.
- 2 The human body is composed of 52 to 60% water, and jellyfish are composed of 98%. Both are therefor (...)
8Additionally, human bodies undergo metamorphosis and become hybrids. In “Flotsam,” as Mary and Vincent witness the transformation of the beach, subjected to defilement by litter, they become part-detritus themselves. Bits of plastic mix with bodies: “Vincent reached over and picked something out of her hair—it was tangled in and it took him a moment to loosen it. It was a strip of blue plastic” (114-15); “when she went to bed there were bits stuck to her feet” (115). In “Smack,” Nicola plans to lie down among poisoned jellyfish, thereby exposing herself to the pollution, and becoming part-jellyfish, that is, a body of water among other bodies of water: “she imagines herself a jellyfish—a blind thing, tearable as paper, sinking down beneath black water” (143); “They will cover her, glove her hands, circle her ankles. . . . She will imagine herself sinking down, becoming something less than solid, spilling insides onto the sand” (145).2 Hybridity here goes further than a mere physical communion, as Nicola identifies with the jellyfish and wishes to share their slow agony. The human-detritus and the human-animal hybrids crystallise within the ecogothic imagery the interconnectedness of bodies of water. Voluntary or forced exposure to waterworlds both result in changes to landscapes and beings, including humans, who cannot escape the slow violence of pollution. This places human characters in an ecocentric reality, and on a par with animals and matter affected by pollution.
9Taking this ecocentrism a step further, the ocean is described as having sick waters: water is animalised. The “prominent Western cultural tradition, inherited from antiquity, that figures the beach as the space where ‘the ocean purges itself and throws up its monsters’” (Packham et al. 8) takes on new meaning as the ocean is depicted as regurgitating the pollution that was discharged into the water. In “Flotsam,” the oceanic mouth vomits rocks as well as hubcaps: “there were rocks the size of doors that had been thrown up by the tide” (109); “Some [hub-caps] had been thrown up on top of the rocks” (118). The image is extended to the seafront, depicted as a skeletal agonising body surrounding the sick mouth: “it [the cliff] had been whittled down to its bones” (109). In “Smack,” the sick waters vomit poisoned jellyfish: “The ocean empties, a thousand dead and dying invertebrates, jungled tentacles and fine, fragile membranes blanketing the shore two miles in each direction” (127). Thanks to the use of a simile, the waves are described as a mouth as they are pulled by currents: “waves drawing back like lips revealing teeth” (130-31). The sea has bad breath, reminiscent of illness: “The jellyfish return again the next day. Flooding the shoreline in the early morning like a littering of plastic, the beach foul-breathed after a stormy night” (139). The jellyfish are reified by being compared to plastic: poisoned, they become part-detritus too, and the ocean attempts to purge itself of them. The animalisation is extended to include the notion of consciousness: “It is low tide, the sea pretending innocence” (130). In a context of climate crisis when waters are affected by human activity, this characterisation represents waters as agonising. This is poetic license, as water molecules are not endowed with a nervous system enabling them to feel pain, and together with the reification of humans as part-detritus, and the animalisation of humans as part-sea creatures, it helps redefine characters’ and readers’ understanding of their place in the ecosystem. This pathetic fallacy, which animalises, or even humanises water, conveys the damage of marine pollution thanks to a vivid portrayal which is characteristic of the “semantic compression” of meaning in the short story. Clare Hanson refers to this process as “iconic evocation”; “she therefore regards the short story as a form of preference for the visual in place of the discursive” (Brosch 96). As waters are depicted as sick, the visual is combined with the emotional, possibly fostering empathy and allowing the reader to somehow feel for the ocean; as noted by Sabine Wilke, “Literature helps us understand that in the Anthropocene human emotions can be attributed to the environment” (qtd. in Rae 127).
10Ghosts of pollution, hybrid bodies, and sick waters are ecogothic tropes belonging to a poetics of estrangement of the seaside ecosystems. The (eco)gothic is “a language of estrangement rather than belonging” (Smith and Hughes 2), and its combination of the familiar and the strange may lead to “cognitive estrangement” for readers (Suvin 49). This imagery renders the coast somehow foreign and fraught with the fears of pollution infiltrating the permeable membrane of the shore, contaminating the coastal ecosystem to which humans belong. It also provides high memorability to pollution’s pervasive presence on the littoral: it is a ghost of consumerism forever returning and haunting us, it transforms our bodies into part-detritus hybrids, and it makes waters look sick.
- 3 The definitions provided for these three concepts come from Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie.
11While pollution is represented within these blue short stories thanks to the strong ecogothic imagery of ghosts and hybrids, the different modes of strangeness are used to defamiliarise the reader from this pollution and display it and its effects as strange. The uncanny, the weird, and the eerie3 are widely applied concepts in literary studies to characterise the experiences of strangeness that the characters of fiction encounter. They are “modes of . . . fiction, modes of perception, ultimately, you might even say, modes of being” (Fisher 9). The uncanny, first theorised in Freud’s 1919 essay The Uncanny, is also called the unfamiliar familiarity, and refers to something familiar being turned into something unfamiliar, defamiliarising the gaze of both character and reader: “It is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange—about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself” (10). In “Smack,” Nicola’s perception of the shore is rendered unfamiliar with the jellyfish as a new dying presence due to the pollutants which have infiltrated their skins. The uncanny here serves to shed a different light on the depiction of coastal spaces in fiction. The arrival of plastic pollution (“Flotsam”) and of poisoned jellyfish (“Smack”) on the shores is a new reality that characters and readers have to deal with. It modifies the modern popular seaside imaginaries of the coastline as a leisure space for holidays, tourism, and summer recreation into a consciousness of an ecosystem that needs to be taken care of (Packham et al. 9). In that sense, the ecogothic lens on the natural world does not only construe the natural world as a site of terror, but as an opportunity for humans to redefine their place in it:
Fictions which actively defamiliarise the ocean can be used to redress the anthropocentric privilege found in hitherto narratives of the oceanic that were predicated upon mastery and control, and . . . uncanny moments of displacement and uncertainty can illuminate human/oceanic interconnections and foster a sense of responsibility and compassion towards the oceans. (Rae 61)
In “Flotsam,” the plastic detritus encountered by Mary on the beach is uncanny because it is indistinguishable from seaweed and from the sand, transforming a familiar landscape into something unfamiliar and reconfigured, but also into something uncertain, hard to interpret visually when looking at the shore. The entire story is about Mary and Vincent trying to cope with this unfamiliar change on the coast: “sometimes things looked like sand, but they weren’t sand, really” (116). The house becomes quite literally uncanny, which etymologically comes from the German word unheimlich, “unhomely,” as Mary and Vincent gather the plastic waste which they collect, turning their home into a giant bin:
The floor was a teeming mass of boxes and crates, ropes, plastic bottles, wet shoes, chipped and broken toys. There were reams of greasy netting with tins and plastic beads and pen lids caught in them; and a heap of oil cans and rubber gloves and mouldy bits of fabric . . . She stood in the middle of the garage. There was so much of it—it was piled halfway up the walls. (116)
Thanks to the juxtaposition and coordination of noun phrases describing the objects accumulating in the garage, the proliferation of collected waste is inscribed within the grammar. The repetition of the deictic “it” gives it more space and prominence within the sentence to represent the monstrosity of “it” all. “Patterns of repetition, the use of lists, and contrasts of space” are linguistic characteristics of the uncanny short story (Hamilton 15), which can be found in the ecogothic blue short story. The house as the traditional oikos is redefined, populated by plastics, to resemble the habitat of fish in the sea and their cohabitation with different forms of pollution. “Classically, monstrosity rarely inhabits the home—when it arrives at home it comes as a dread warning or portent” (Jones 24): the uncanny house-dump functions as such, and as an incentive to better manage the waste we produce as a species. What is thrown in the environment ends up in the sea, and back onto the shore, within our lives, cluttering beaches and houses. While the first sentence of “Flotsam” describes “an empty beach” (109), this space fills up by the end of the short story, creating an uncanny sharp contrast of space, where on the last page, a “shipping container” (122) has beached and seems “unmovable” (122). Mirroring this outdoors change indoors, Mary and Vincent’s house is at first minimalist as “they had got rid of almost everything” (112), while at the end, it is cluttered with detritus. The progressive filling up of outdoors and indoors space constitutes a claustrophobic, suffocating uncanny flux, a poetics of contamination of the inner from the outer, with the inner being pictured as “a vulnerable, malleable, porous, leaky border” (Jones 63). The hoarding of objects found on the beach ironically signals a new way for consumerism to infiltrate the home: no matter how strongly one wishes to be rid of it, it seems to find a way back into the house. This mirroring of outdoor and indoor spaces can also be found in “Smack”: while the jellyfish are deprived of their vital habitat, the sea, and empty of their vital substance on the shore, Nicola’s house also progressively empties from sustenance as she finishes the last of the food. The picturing of seasides as becoming uncanny/unhomely for both human and non-human animals is an essential characteristic of the blue ecogothic short story.
12Overall, these stories display a weird reality; a reality that is monstrous, multifaceted, and hard to grasp, with “a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience” (Fisher 8). In “Smack,” the en masse presence of poisoned jellyfish on the sand is weird per se for its “obsession with transdimensional invertebrate life-forms,” “tentacular creatures” and “octopodes” (Jones 16). However, instead of portraying the jellyfish as “a monstrous alterity,” traditionally favoured by weird fiction when it comes to these marine creatures (16), the internal focalisation through Nicola shows empathy for them, therefore operating a form of gaze displacement onto these animals. As is characteristic of weird tales, this “unsettles expectations about who or what matters in the storyworld” (Miller 245). While Nicola exits her home to become a weird human-jellyfish hybrid, she takes on “the form that is perhaps most appropriate to the weird,” which is “montage—the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together” (Fisher 11). This montage fosters one affect that the weird produces, which is “perturbation” (15). Another way that the weird produces this affect is through portrayals of “the insignificance of humanity” (Jones 16). In both “Smack” and “Flotsam,” humans and human relationships become insignificant. In “Flotsam,” interpersonal issues are mentioned in passing but never explained: Vincent tells Mary that “‘Something’s up with Jack again’” (112), but Jack’s identity and problem are never revealed. In “Smack,” interpersonal issues are extensively detailed but appear futile and harmful, consisting in bickering over consumerist habits of buying QVC objects, for example. Compared to the progressive and continuous defilement of the beach by detritus and to the recurring tides of poisoned jellyfish doomed to come to die on the shores, interpersonal relationships appear pointless and shift to the background of the stories (“Flotsam”) or else serve in the narrative to reinforce the criticism of consumerism (“Smack”).
13Additionally, the weaving of the different registers of strangeness includes the eerie, which, in terms of affect, constitutes a “disengagement from our current attachments” (Fisher 13). This affect can be witnessed in both “Flotsam” and “Smack,” where Mary, Vincent, and Nicola, detach from their relationships with their relatives. Their defamiliarisation through social disengagement enables them to focus on their defiled surroundings. The character as a social being dissolves to give way to the character as a conscious animal in an environment degraded by humans. The eerie produces such disengagement from past attachment due to increased focus on an incoherent or alien state of something, “constituted by a failure of absence or a failure of presence” (61): something is there and should not be there, or something is not there, and should be there. The eerie leads to the coexistence of two visions, which are superimposed: the image of a place as it should be, and that of the place in its anomalous state. The unrelenting waves of plastic on the beach, on bodies, and in houses, exponentially growing and taking up all the space, are monstrous productions of consumerism, and are eerie in “Flotsam”: “One morning Mary was out walking when she saw something glinting further down the beach. The glinting thing was half-buried. It was a plastic bottle . . . . The plastic was tinged blue and the top was sticking up among the stones and shells. It didn’t look right. It didn’t look like it was supposed to be there” (110). As noted by Mark Fisher, “the eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non-existence: why is there something here when there should be nothing?” (12). The eeriness of the double vision of the untouched shore, and that of the defiled coast, is reinforced by the supernatural dimension of plastic waste as it moves and produces spectral sounds, endowed with an agency which is counter-intuitive for plastic. In “Smack,” at the end of the story, the projection of Nicola who wants to lie down with the jellyfish is eerie too: it is both there and not there in the mind of the reader, in a liminal space between realisation and non-realisation. Doubt persists as to her final decision, which generates a feeling of eeriness: is she, or is she not a woman-jellyfish? It does seem, though, that the projection is sufficient for her to be, within the imagination of the reader. The eerie brings about “the broader question of the agency of the immaterial and the inanimate, that is, the agency of minerals and landscape . . . , and the way that ‘we’ ‘ourselves’ are caught up in the rhythms, pulsions and patternings of non-human forces. There is no inside except as a folding of the outside” (Fisher 11-12). The fascination for this eerie changing outdoors reality is what enables the main characters to repurpose their lives, with a heightened focus on shore ecosystems (“Flotsam”) and non-human animals (jellyfish in “Smack”): the eerie “is this release from the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality” (13).
14In these blue ecogothic short stories with an ecological focus on seaside ecosystems, the uncanny, the weird, and the eerie are therefore modes of perceiving the strangeness of the new reality characters are exposed to. The uncanny does this by displaying what should be familiar, here the coastal ecosystem, as strange; the weird does it through a focus on a reconfigured reality which seems anomalous because it is made of parts which do not readily function well together; the eerie, through the superimposed vision of two irreconcilable realities.
15Once pollution is signposted as moving along the marine ecosystem, and once the reader is defamiliarised from the seaside thanks to the modes of strangeness of the uncanny, the weird, and the eerie, the two blue ecogothic short stories lead to a reappraisal of monstrosity. At first sight, one may be inclined to think that monstrosity lies, as in traditional gothic tales, in otherness, that is, in the ghosts, hybrids, or animalised waters, or even in creatures like the jellyfish, whose functioning is fundamentally different from ours. However, these stories point to a different type of monstrosity, which dwells in humans. Implicitly, these pieces of fiction therefore depict human characters as monsters perpetuating slow violence. The first reaction of characters to this slow violence is their lack of concern for it. In “Flotsam,” Mary starts to clean the beach because of a desire to preserve the aesthetic beauty of the landscape, and not because of any ecological preoccupation. Before gaining ecological awareness and collecting the detritus from the beach, she buries it in the sand to conceal it from view: “There. She couldn’t even tell it was there anymore. And later, the tide would take it away for good” (111). She tries to think of other ways to hide the plastic bottles: “She thought about putting them behind one of the big rocks, but she would probably still be able to see them from the house” (111). Mary’s strong-mindedness to fight the tides of plastic therefore develops progressively. She first realises that hiding the bottles does not solve the problem given that “[t]here was nowhere for the bottles to go. They were too big to bury, and there were too many of them” (111); and she then comprehends that collecting them does not resolve anything: “Where would it all go, after it had been collected? It wouldn’t really be gone, would it? It would just be somewhere else. It would be somewhere else, instead of here. Maybe, eventually, some of it would end up back on the beach. Her heart beat hard, almost painfully” (117). This permanence of waste, underlined by the repetition of “somewhere else,” causes disarray in Mary: if it is the piling up of detritus on the beach that seems problematic to her at first, by the end of the story, it is its accumulation in the whole world that she fathoms as troublesome. Therefore, what Mary becomes aware of little by little is pollution as a “hyperobject,” “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton 1): it is somehow within her reach—she collects it everyday—but out of grasp, as it is part of another “hyperobject” which keeps fuelling it, that is, consumerism always producing more objects destined to become waste. In “Smack,” the lack of ecological consciousness is displayed as even more radical: no character asks themselves how to prevent the tides of jellyfish, not even Nicola, who feels for them. Nicola observes with resignation the gory fascination of tourists and media towards the jellyfish, and the sheer violence of how they pick them up with pick axes to put them in bins or pile them up on a pyre to burn them. These stories therefore display the ecological phenomena of tides of dying animals and of plastic as a warning which is not perceived as such by humans in “Smack” and which cannot be solved by a few individuals only in “Flotsam.” The figures of ghosts of pollution, hybrids, and sick waters serve as a reflective mirror displaying both the slow violence and the monstrosity of the consumerist system that engenders it.
16By contrast to the ecogothic and ecohorror dimensions of these blue short stories, which expose the monstrosity of consumerism, some lyrical sentences are reminiscent of the pastoral tradition and act as pointers to a desired or idealised sense of reality:
She undid her hair and let it stream out. She started humming. There were shallow pools among the rocks and they rippled in the wind. . . . She reached down and picked up some of the seaweed. She liked the way it popped under her hands. But it wasn’t seaweed. . . . [It was] heaps of twisted nylon rope. All along the tideline, as far as she could see, the beach was covered in small, sharp fragments. (113)
In this passage from “Flotsam,” the disillusion of discovering that what Mary believed to be seaweed is, in fact, heaps of twisted nylon rope puts an end to an ideal of untouched nature, and fosters a sense of ecohorror. At the same time, a seaside without waste is shown as an idyllic vision providing a sense of freedom, happiness, and aesthetic beauty. The superposition of both visions of the seascape, the unspoiled one and the spoiled one, which this passage conflates in the mind of the reader, is eerie, and replete with solastalgia, a place-based form of distress in the face of a profoundly changing environment (Albrecht). In “Smack,” there is also a contrast between the ecohorror of the dying jellyfish and lyrical descriptions of a communion with them: “drowned in air, they break apart and bleed their interiors” (127); “split open and unbodied, a mess of tentacles and bells and polyps that men running clean-up operations have failed to sweep away” (131). The additive conjunction of coordination “and” contributes to this incremental construction of horror through the breaking up of noun phrases mirroring the depiction of the jellyfish as dismembered. These passages of ecohorror are contrasted with those, lyrical, where Nicola projects to lie down among the jellyfish to find a form of peace among them: “Nicola will stay with them well into the morning, their pulsing bells like so many painful hearts. Blanketed, almost head to toe, she will feel the tide recede. Her fingers will come to feel a touch gelatinous at their points, softened along their webbing” (145). If it is an ideal of communion with the seaside landscape which is presented as desirable in “Flotsam,” here in “Smack,” it is an ideal of osmosis with “otherness,” with non-human animals. While the ecohorror and ecogothic imagery serve to display the slow violence of pollution, by contrast, they also enable moments of ecocentric communion with animal and non-animal ecosystems to stand out. The juxtaposition of idyllic and ecohorror passages procures a reappraisal of what it means nowadays to exist as a human on the seaside. The untouched nature is fathomable in our mindscapes, and yet out of reach on our landscapes, in a liminal space, there and not there, and therefore as a “transitional setting.” It is this type of “threshold situation” that is brought to light particularly well in (eco)gothic fiction and in the brief temporality of short stories (Achilles and Bergmann 4). Implicitly, the question of the durability of this double eerie vision is asked: will future generations be able to think of seaside ecosystems as untouched, or will they be past this liminal stage, capable of only seeing them as polluted?
17The lyrical passages outlined above are not evolutive in these short stories, in the sense that the vision of communion with human and non-human ecosystems does not lead to anything other than a possible reflection by the reader on the elusive nature of untouched ecosystems in the twenty-first century. These parts of the stories, therefore, remain in the mind of the reader as floating visions, as respites from the dominant ecohorror, in a state of suspension. As hinted at earlier, within the stories, interpersonal relationships between characters are also in a state of suspension bordering with social isolation: once the characters have realised that the effects of pollution—tides of waste (“Flotsam”) and of jellyfish (“Smack”)—are permanent phenomena, they engage in a form of ecocentrism in which anthropocentric relationships gradually dissolve. Without a clean environment, the character as a social animal can no longer be: it is shown as endangered, and it is put on hold. This state of suspension also characterises the ending of these stories, with no falling action in the narrative arc, as the beachings of jellyfish and detritus just continue exponentially, and with no resolution. After the climax, situated in both stories around a stormy night which brings about massive arrivals of detritus (“Flotsam”) and jellyfish (“Smack”), the story’s rising action continues with more waste and more jellyfish being stranded, bringing ever-rising tension to the story, and leading to an open ending with the characters’ bewilderment at “unmovable” detritus in the shape of a “shipping container” (122) in “Flotsam,” or with the contemplation of the main character’s potential death among dying sea creatures in “Smack.” The narrative arc of these stories can therefore be described as an ever-rising tension crystallising in a state of suspension where the near future of the characters is uncertain. Will Nicola die among the jellyfish? Will Mary and Vincent manage to keep collecting detritus when some of it is too big to be collected? The reader is left with the question: “what next?” Deprived of meaningful social relations, and of a vision for the future, the main characters of the blue ecogothic short story represent a form of nihilism to which humanity is condemned if the main ecological threats are not dealt with in a systemic, collective way.
18The ecogothic representation of consumerism as it pollutes animals and beaches, therefore, successfully de-invisibilises this type of pollution, making its slow violence tangible for both characters and readers. The moments of crisis depicted in these stories work together to create a vivid picture of what is at stake: the haunting of the shores by the remains of pollution and ever-increasing due to unbridled global consumerism, and the eco-anxiety and solastagia they cause to some characters, such as Mary and Vincent in “Flotsam” by Lucy Wood. They also launch within the readers’ mind a process of reappraisal of priorities by foregrounding ecological issues such as pollution while interpersonal matters are silenced (“Flotsam”) or depicted as toxic (“Smack”). The use of stories and metaphors is advocated by the cognitive science of risk perception and management (Van der Linden et al. 761), as these narratives reduce psychological distance with ecological events by making the impact of pollution on beaches and marine lives seen and felt. Crucially, they foreground risk as “present, local, and personal” instead of “future, distant, global, nonpersonal, and analytical.” This “facilitate[s] more affective and experiential engagement” through “negative affect”—such as may be produced by the ecogothic—which is “one of the strongest drivers of climate change risk perceptions and policy support” because “how we feel about a given situation often has a potent influence on our decisions about how to respond” (758-59). Additionally, as a form of “long-lasting driver of pro-environmental behavior,” fiction may promote intrinsic (emotional and personal) motivation, rather than extrinsic (abstract and external) incentive. Fiction, as a relatable, personal, and concrete simulation of social worlds (Oatley 618) enables readers to draw comparisons between the storyworld and their everyday lives, which may foster reflections on what could be done differently in their daily lives. As a “moral laboratory” (Hakemulder 11) where readers can simulate ways of being in the world, fiction has been shown in empirical studies to reinforce empathy and develop creativity regarding how to be and act in the world, especially in the case of literary short fiction containing highly vivid imagery (Oatley 621). It is therefore possible that blue ecogothic short stories will lead to a form of emotional creativity to deal with ecological issues, and to exist in a more ecocentric reality. In that sense, if readers feel eco-anxiety or solastalgia thanks to identification with characters, these emotions may be conducive to intentions of action to preserve marine ecosystems. Studies in empirical ecocriticism that look into the impact of fiction on readers (Schneider-Mayerson et al.), may be able to confirm this hypothesis. Another avenue for empirical ecocriticism to explore is whether the lyrical passages reminiscent of the pastoral in which characters experience a sense of osmosis with marine ecosystems as can be found in both “Flotsam” and “Smack” might encourage empathy and a will to protect the seaside and its biodiversity better. Research in empirical ecocriticism already shows that literary fiction can influence attitudes towards specific species, namely apes (Małecki et al.). It may therefore be the case that water fiction could influence attitudes towards marine species as well. Overall, these blue ecogothic short stories evoke climate change in an embodied and grounded way, which may help us reconsider the potential environmental and social impact of our daily choices on marine ecosystems.
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19The ecogothic blue short story is characterised by the recycling of the gothic imagery of ghosts, hybrids, and sickness adapted to the ecological context: ghosts of pollution, human-detritus, human-sea-creature hybrids, and animalised sick waters. It imagines the effects of pollution on sullied landscapes and lives, and questions the industrial and social model which caused this phenomenon. As applied to these stories, the concept of pollution corresponds both to its modern definition as physical degradation, and to its earlier definition as moral defilement. Plastic mixes with hair and covers the seaside to replace seaweeds within the visual and mental landscape (“Flotsam”). The jellyfish do not belong in oceans anymore, which have become too uninhabitable; they are fated to die on the shores in front of humans who show no interest in understanding this phenomenon (“Smack”). The blue ecogothic short story develops an ecopoetics of polluted seascapes and a zoopoetic of hybrid creatures generated by pollution. This enables the authors to display the slow violence of pollution by representing it with impactful imagery: “imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear, making it accessible and tangible by humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses” (Nixon 15-16). A central problem of slow violence such as pollution is the issue of seeing: who sees? If no one sees, how can this reality be made visible? The ecogothic is a literary modality that provides an answer to this issue of representability:
To confront slow violence requires, then, that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time. The representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To intervene representationally entails devising iconic symbols that embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse symbols with dramatic urgency. (Nixon 10)
The blue ecogothic short story therefore gives shape, with the gothic tropes of ghosts, hybrids, and sickness, to what Rachel Carson called “a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure” (238).
20Concurrently, the use of the uncanny, the weird, and the eerie convey, thanks to the expression of different types of strangeness, a form of defamiliarisation from the familiarity of seaside landscapes and animals. While these modes will not be identified as such by all readers, they will be perceived by most in terms of the strange or gloomy mood they imbue fiction with. Landscapes and biodiversity are impacted by pollution, which influences the mindscapes of the characters, and potentially of readers too as they are made to gradually perceive the harm that is being done. Overall, the blue ecogothic short story develops an ecocentric poetics of reappraisal, promoting a posthumanist lens of transcorporeality, porosity, and lability. “The Gothic and ecoGothic offer . . . a valuable critical framework to coastal studies” (Packham et al. 6): it may lead to apprehending water as an oikos of all sorts of life forms, including human lives. Therefore, “the ecoGothic is a flavoured mode through which we can examine our darker, more complicated cultural representations of the nonhuman world—which are all the more relevant in times of ecological crises” (Parker 36). “Flotsam” and “Smack” invite readers, thanks to identification to characters, to clean beaches of detritus and become aware that cleaning is not sufficient as the problem is systemic and related to the hyperobject of consumerism (“Flotsam”), and to develop empathy for creatures who may be very different both physically and sensorially from us, such as jellyfish (“Smack”). Fiction is shown in cognitive neuroscience to provide “a kind of simulation that enables exploration of minds and . . . literary simulations help us to improve” (Oatley 626) as human beings on the planet. This encourages readers to go be-yond, that is, to be yonder, to project themselves as an integral part of the seaside ecosystems, and to identify with marine creatures. This empathetic simulation may promote future pro-environmental actions from readers.