Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction by Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari (review)

A verdant field ripe for interdisciplinary cross-pollination, plant studies has been slow to take root in the humanities and the arts. Examining the perennial difficulties of representing the lives of plants—ethically, culturally, politically, historically, philosophically, and textually—helps to explain why. Against predominant views of vegetal life as vegetative (in the medical sense), Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari's collaboratively authored Radical Botany charts four-hundred-plus years of storytelling about plant life to identify mainly historical, philosophical, and textual conditions that prove conducive to recognizing the vegetal as a lively, animate force in world-making. Compelled by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's famous injunction to "follow the plants,"¹ the authors direct their project away from abstract conceptions and toward material engagements with plant life, and dig into a fascinating history.

The book's preface identifies how its primary focus on human-vegetal relations—"the uneasy alliances and ambivalent attachments that plants make with humans, and humans with plants"²—became grafted onto a writing process shared between the two authors. The pushes and pulls of collaborative writing underscore a sense of authorial hesitancy and textual tensions within the archive they assemble. This also allows them to provide an intended corrective to the privileging of plant horror, or "disturbing and troubling" representations of plants, by balancing discussions with potentially "joyful, enlivening, transformative" botanical speculations, sometimes included within the same text.³ Rather than providing a comprehensive introduction to plants in literature and film, the goal of the book is to historicize a more balanced view of plants as agential forces shaping human and nonhuman worlds. In their introductory chapter, Meeker and Szabari draw predominantly from materialist, feminist, and ecocritical theory to make the case that select examples from literature, philosophy, and film constitute a minor tradition of "radical botany, in which plants are not just objects of manipulation but participants in the effort to imagine new worlds and to envision new futures."⁴ The "radical" move is identifying plants with anti-anthropocentric deliberation in post-Renaissance European history. Instead of a backlash against vitalist notions of plants as the gateway drug to Romanticist visions of nature as a mirror of the human mind, Meeker and Szabari trace a genealogy through which the writings of seventeenth-century French libertins érudits (libertine scholars) set the precedent for a materialist and aesthetic tendency to think with plants that allows for vegetal life exceeding human perception.

The book's ensuing chapters center on comparative close readings of texts by writers and filmmakers that represent eras, forms, or genres of speculative plant fictions. Chapter 2 compares a couple of fanciful philosophical fictions by Cyrano de Bergerac with the botanical writings of his contemporary Guy de La Brosse (most famous today for having created the royal medicinal herb garden that became Paris's Jardin des Plantes) in order to tease out a common theme of representing plants as percipient and libidinal that cuts across French science fact and fiction at the outset. Comparing Norwegian and French examples, chapter 3 centers on a pair of eighteenth-century satires of plant-dominated societies by likewise prominent and prolific writers Ludvig Holberg and Tiphaigne de la Roche in order to argue that their utopian elements and decentering of human desire ground a profound critique of Enlightenment thinking. Chapter 4 reads as the most speculative in terms of its framework, shifting to the US context to chart growing ambivalence across the nineteenth century about the vegetal aesthetics of Romanticism through a short story by Edgar Allen Poe and one by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, both of which foreground and undermine their human characters' affinities with plants. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on plants in film in the twentieth century, respectively, in the French avant-garde cinema of Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac, and in the US plant horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (both film versions and their source...