Ecologies of the Undead: George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo and the Limits of the Ecogothic

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• Ecologies of the Undead: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo and the Limits of the Ecogothic
• Eric Gary Anderson (bio)

Introduction: The Outer Limits

“EcoGothic” is, as Elizabeth Parker has written, a “fledgling term.”¹ Young as it is, it has already proven remarkably fruitful, in large part because it merges the open-endedness of ecocriticism with the ambiguities baked into gothic to describe an unsettling, elusive “ecocentric ambience” that has a long literary and cultural reach.² The ecogothic thus extends an American (and, as Parker argues, transnational) gothic that is itself capacious, “less a genre than a fluid, ubiquitous literary mode.”³ Ecogothic studies is off to a quick start, with a dedicated scholarly journal, Gothic Nature; a monograph by the journal’s co-founder and co-editor, Parker; a collection of critical essays edited by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils; and numerous journal articles and academic conferences. As Parker and co-editor Michelle Poland announce in the introduction to the second issue of Gothic Nature, published in 2021, “We live in ecoGothic times.”⁴

With this statement, Parker and Poland productively complicate the already formidable challenge of defining ecogothic by proposing that it encompasses not only grounded spatial locations—an old house in a dark forest, say—but also more abstract and more wide-ranging temporal coordinates. But what are “ecoGothic times?” What does it mean to view both space and time as both ecological and gothic? In his recent study of Anthropocene poetics, David Farrier points out that the Anthropocene by definition denotes human influence on physical environments and further posits that its “temporality . . . is [End Page 165] deeply menacing. Its breadth is bewildering.”⁵ Farrier goes on to suggest that a vocabulary of ghosts and hauntings can help us wrap our minds around the vastness of the problem, the “unsettling” ways in which “our present is in fact accompanied by deep pasts and deep futures.”⁶ Such arguments, with their attention to “the reciprocal relationship between life and nonlife,”⁷ also drive the edited collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, which is organized into sections on “Ghosts of the Anthropocene” and “Monsters of the Anthropocene.” The editors of this volume ask: “How can we get back to the pasts we need to see the present more clearly? We call this return to multiple pasts, human and not human, ‘ghosts.’ Every landscape is haunted by past ways of life” and, as if that is not enough eco-cultural spectrality, “anthropogenic landscapes are also haunted by imagined futures.”⁸

Such approaches resonate not only with current ecogothic thinking but also with George Saunders’s 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which is ghost-saturated and anchored to a very specific landscape as well as to a very specific historical moment, yet also temporally fluid and generous in imagining possible futures that ultimately break free of the bounded, ripely ecogothic space where much of the book’s action takes place, Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, DC.⁹ Bardo speaks to numerous concerns relevant to ecogothic studies: ecophobic entanglements; racial hauntings; queer undeadness; transcorporeality; questions of human and environmental agency; body horror; plant horror (especially demonic tendrils); and, ultimately, the positing of an uncanny nation that, if it were to come into being, would incorporate both whites and Blacks, both the socially privileged and underclasses, but also both the living and the undead and both the past and the future as bookends for a war-torn 1862 narrative present.¹⁰ Lincoln in the Bardo thus reads its ghosts as both past and future citizens. Put another way, the ghosts in this novel are anchored to their memories of having been fully alive and are also making their way toward new ideas of undead agency that enable them to redefine themselves posthumously as Americans. Relatedly, I argue, the ecogothic manifests in occasional, flickering ways in this novel, as one among many genres and modes, rather than as a dominant mode. Like the undead characters in the book, the ecogothic itself transforms; Bardo illuminates unmistakably ecogothic moments but more frequently offers hinges between the ecogothic and a wide variety of other modes, many of them not...