The Wood Within: The Deathless Vegetal as a Component of Posthuman Corporeality in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Novels

The global environmental challenges we face today necessitate a reconciliation between man and all beings that he once labeled monstrous: women, animals, plants. Modern fantasy literature is a potential contact zone with these culturally constructed Others. The paper argues that Robert Holdstock’s Mythago novels offer a redefinition of the human through a corporeal reintegration of the vegetal. Based on Dawn Keetley’s theses of plant horror, vegetal “deathlessness” is defined as a plant’s ability to blur the anthropocentric dichotomy of life and death. Holdstock heavily relies on vegetal deathlessness throughout the Mythago texts: the vegetal physically enters the protagonist’s body, stretching and transforming it beyond the limits of human time and space. The result is a hybrid entity enriched by the more-than-human experience. Through the close reading of the Mythago novels, the paper intends to reveal that despite this mutual trespassing, humans and plants are interdependent in their endeavor to maintain the landscape. (MR)