CHAPTER EIGHT

NATURE, ECOCRITICISM
AND POSTHUMANIST MELANCHOLY
(NOVELS BY OLGA TOKARCZUK CONTINUED)

The eye opens. The black glaze, the liquid

blackness, like an abyss, it seems with no
boundaries. No one knows what it looks at, but
it is certain it sees.
(Final Stories, Tokarczuk 2006, 113)1

I would like to start this chapter by focusing on the thirteen-year-old

protagonist, Erna, from the 1995 novel E.E. by Olga Tokarczuk, whom we
met in Chapter One.2 Erna was born at the dawn of the twentieth century
in the city of Wroc aw, which until 1945 was the German city of Breslau.
The time setting is important as a reference to the early modernist
fascination with human psychology and the popularity of psychoanalysis,
along with the popularity of occultism and other supernatural phenomena.
One day, Ernas mother discovers her psychic skills: she can see and talk
to ghosts. From then on, Erna becomes the centre of attention for many
people: her mother, who fancies her own popularity as the mother of
someone with supernatural powers; the neighbours, who wish to talk to
their deceased relatives; and the doctor, who is exploring a new
disciplinepsychoanalysis.

All translations in this chapter, if not otherwise stated or not from published
translations, are my own. U.CH.
2
Erna appears in the 1995 novel E.E. In this chapter I will refer to the following
novels by Olga Tokarczuk: E.E., 1995; Prawiek i inne czasy (Primeval and Other
Times), 1996/2000; Dom dzienny, dom nocny (House of Day, House of Night),
1998/2002; Ostatnie historie (Final Stories), 2006; Bieguni (Runners), 2007;
Prowad swj p ug przez ko ci umar ych (Drive Your Plough over the Bones of the
Dead), 2009.

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Chapter Eight

Her own wishes are forgotten; her games and friends are taken away.
As an already vulnerable young girl, she is now turned into a passive
possession of the adults world, and of the adults language that
accommodates her in their world for their own purposes. As a matter of
fact, she becomes a vehicle for attempting to realize the adults dreams.
Therefore Erna tried to be in the park as often as possible. This was the
only place where no one looked at her, no one coached her or felt sorry for
her (Tokarczuk 1995, 171). She escapes from the archetypical dimension
of peace and cosinessfrom homeinto the wilderness, where she feels
comfortable and good, as she stares at the alive, young, massive and
merciless river (ibid., 172). The landscape that surrounds her is not a
peaceful, submissive witness to her existence; it is an agent imposing on
her, her own self-knowledge: Her senses only now open up to the
exterior (ibid.). This is the place where Erna becomes a physical being,
where she realizes that she is a being made of flesh:
She was astonished to feel her every step. She had known before that she
could walk, that she had legs and even something between thema hole
facing the earth, the opposition of the mouth. She was a pipe on two legs.
(ibid., 175)

It is nature that gives Erna the feeling of being a part of something

bigger, and the sensation of freedom from being controlled by someone
elses normative look. Nature talks to Erna, communicates with her not
through looking but through the most primal sensetouch (with its
connection also to smell).
She felt the sour and searing smell of the live leaves, they touched her
body delicately and brutally, they caressed her and pressed her. She put the
leaves on her naked belly, her breasts and arms; she spread them over her
face until she lost her breath completely. (ibid.)

Ernas sensation of her connection with nature brings up the notion of

the Kristevan chora, the primeval connection between a mother and child,
where there is no division between outside and inside, subject and object,
between the I and the other. In the moment of Ernas most vivid
closeness to the wilderness, she experiences her menstrual bleeding for the
first time, which emphasizes her corporeality. When her family learns
about her first menstruation, she is proclaimed to be a woman. Scared,
however, she escapes to the park to avoid her sisters and mother who
connect her bleeding body with the emblematic social role of a woman.
Erna senses the division between her home and the park: the park was the

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185

domain of the young Erna; but once her adult identity starts to constitute
itself, her relationship with the earth others, such as nature or the
landscape of the park, weakens. As long as she is still a child, she can still
manoeuvre between the boundaries.
Nevertheless, just as the Kristevan chora must be forgotten in the
Symbolic order, Erna must forget the wildernessonce she enters the
domain of the adults. When the psychoanalyst visits Erna at work in the
hat store, years after her life as a medium is over, she cannot remember
anything. She has forgotten both her spiritual experiences and her
connection with or longing for nature. The hat store emphasizes her new
belonging to the adult, Symbolic order. The hats that protect one from
natural phenomena (associated with danger), sunshine and freezing
weather, are symbols of the masquerade one has to conform to, in order to
become the Self. Within this masquerade, memory also has to be
manipulated, re-shaped, thus allowing the Symbolic order to dominate.
This juxtaposition of the landscape and the young girl can be
understood in various contexts. On the one hand, we see Erna in a
transitory position: Erna is just a child, therefore she cannot be completely
associated with cultural, symbolic adulthood. Nevertheless, she still
belongs to the cultural (for example, her longing for books). She is in the
process of the symbolic acquisition of language. This is why the adults can
easily manipulate her, and this is also the reason why she escapes to the
wilderness, landscapes, park, rivers, which, just like her, are deprived of
their own agency. The connection between the child and nature is possible
thanks to their mutual vulnerability, which is, in fact, the lack of the
colonizing gaze, the lack of the need to appropriate each other. On the
other hand, the wilderness where Erna finds herself also has a transitory
statusit is a park, a space already transformed by human beings. This
transitory position of both Erna and the park gives them a similar
ontological status. Erna and the park are, in a sense, examples of
cyborgspartly natural, partly humanand therefore they can
communicate with each other as equal partners.
I believe Donna Haraways interpretation of cyborgs may be useful in
this context. A cyborg is a creature of social reality as well as a creature
of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important
political construction, a world-changing fiction (Haraway 1985, online
source). Haraway, in her manifesto, compares the womens movement,
including its political construction of womens experience, conceived as
a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind, with the
construction of a cyborg. Haraway shows how