VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)

By: Matthew De Abaitua
July 9, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

SWAMP THING | ALAN MOORE, STEPHEN BISSETTE, JOHN TOTLEBEN | 1984–1987

Sentient pareidolia: What if the faces we see in the randomness of reality could take on minds of their own? What if noticing the outline of a face within, say, the trunk of a tree concentrates available sentience and brings a mind to the surface?

It is paradoxical, I know, that a projection of the human sensorium might possess agency external to the human mind. But it might also be the origin of supernatural figures: they start out as a smile upon the cap of a mushroom and then become, through cultural accretion, an entity with agency.

Within the various scientific and philosophical trends of the last three decades, there is an apprehension that — to quote John Fowles’ The Magus — “that great passive monster, reality, was no longer dead, easy to handle. It was full of a mysterious vigour, new forms, new possibilities.” I am interested in a more active representation of reality than its traditional passivity.

Steeped as I am in the British comic writers and artists of the 1980s, the first image that comes to mind when imagining sentient pareidolia is the red eyes and horned ridges of Swamp Thing’s face. I am specifically picturing issue 37 (June 1985) of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, the story of Nukeface — a drifter who chugs away at a flask of toxic waste. Nukeface’s touch corrupts the floral body of swamp thing. As a result, for the first time Swamp Thing learns to push his consciousness out of his body of plant matter and into the green: that vast interconnected arboreal biome of Earth. Issue 37 also inaugurates a story line in which a gathering Cthulhu-like entity cultivates a dark energy in the collective unconscious, bringing supernatural entities (vampires, werewolves) into existence.

Moore’s moves anticipate the recent mycelium turn in literary studies, a turn driven by the post-Suzanne Simard view of the social and altruistic behaviour of trees, and the strange qualities of fungi summarised in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: key ideas of the twenty-first century that posit agency in the non-human. Moore was writing at a time when the Gaia hypothesis — the idea that the biological system of Earth is interconnected and exhibits the behaviour of a single entity — was prevalent. The consciousness of Swamp Thing, then, is a green pulse within this global nervous system.

Moore has always been interested in expanding the consciousness and unconsciousness in which his fictions operate. He was interested in the theories of Merlin’s father Rupert Sheldrake and morphogenetic fields: a positing of a scientific mechanism underlying the collective unconsciousness. My favourite conceit of Jung’s — flowers are god’s thoughts — reminds of us those occasions when collective unconscious waves at us like Wordsworth’s daffodils, or winks at us like an eye in bark.

Swamp Thing #37 also introduces John Constantine to the DC universe. As his initials suggest, Constantine is a liminal messiah. (Modelled on the appearance of Sting, Moore tells stories of meeting Constantine in a sandwich bar.) Moore’s work brings various fictions — some forgotten, some canonical — into one cohesive world: What if all the conspiracies surrounding Jack the Ripper were one narrative, as in From Hell; what if all the characters of the genre fiction of the Victorian period co-existed in one fictional realm, an idea explored as superhero fiction in League of Extraordinary Gentleman and as erotica in Lost Girls. There is always a yearning to make the border of world and text permeable so that there can be free, magical traffic between them.

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VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (3)

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