The abcanny politics of landscape in Lucy Wood’s Diving Belles

Paul March-Russell

doi:10.1386/fict.7.1.53_1

Abstract

Abstract In a recent article on the eeriness of the English countryside, Robert Macfarlane juxtaposes an official version of English culture, which emphasizes heritage, progress and national unity, with the unofficial versions of ‘Englishness’ being offered by writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers that emphasize local differences, dispossessed peoples or communities, and historical decay or regression. These themes, according to Macfarlane, are mediated through preoccupations with violence, ruins and the uncanny – the revival of interest in Weird fiction writers, such as M. R. James, being exemplary. This article takes up but also expands upon Macfarlane’s argument by focussing on a recent text: Lucy Wood’s 2012 collection, Diving Belles. Of interest here is Wood’s use of the Cornish landscape that she invests not only with literal spirits and ghosts but also with a Weird-like sense of what China Miéville has termed the ‘abcanny’, such that her stories hover somewhere between the traditional ghost story, mundane realism and a peculiarly English variant of magical realism. Although there is little overt political content in Wood’s stories, this article argues that the abcanny form of her stories, whilst also contesting heritage-based representations of Cornwall, mediates the ambiguous relationship of Cornwall towards the English political heartlands. In this sense, then, Macfarlane’s argument can be helpfully developed since, whilst haunted versions of the English countryside can become assimilated into an official model of national heritage, the abcanny landscape remains estranged from such cultural and political appropriation.

Highlights

Paul March-Russell In April 2015, the nature writer Robert Macfarlane published an evocative article in The Guardian entitled ‘The eeriness of the English countryside’
As Macfarlane acknowledges, he had partially been led to this conclusion by the late Mark Fisher’s writings on hauntology, and in particular, by his 2013 soundscape created with fellow writer and artist Justin Barton, On Vanishing Land. (Fisher’s last book, The Weird and the Eerie [2016], published since this article was first written, effectively expands upon the thesis evoked by Macfarlane.) Macfarlane regards Fisher as belonging to, what the academic James Riley has termed, an ‘occulture’: A loose but substantial body of work [...] that explores the English landscape in terms of its anomalies rather than its continuities, that is sceptical of comfortable notions of ‘dwelling’ and ‘belonging’, and of the packagings of the past as ‘heritage’. (Macfarlane 2015: para 8)
In contradistinction to heritage views of the English countryside that tend to emphasize the pastoral and the bucolic, Macfarlane argues that an eerie perspective foregrounds the worked-upon and lived-in histories of the English landscape: the shared landmarks of this terrain are ruins, fields, pits, fringes, relics, buried objects, hilltops, falcons, demons and deep pasts

Summary

Introduction

In April 2015, the nature writer Robert Macfarlane published an evocative article in The Guardian entitled ‘The eeriness of the English countryside’. Lucy Wood Cornwall landscape folklore Robert Macfarlane weird fiction www.intellectbooks.com 53

Results

Conclusion