Ecologies of the Undead 165 Studies in American Fiction 50.1–2 (2023): 165–188 © 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press Ecologies of the Undead: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo and the Limits of the Ecogothic Eric Gary Anderson George Mason University Introduction: The Outer Limits “E coGothic” 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 “temporal- 166 Studies in American Fiction ity . . . is 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...

亡灵生态学 165 美国小说研究 50.1–2 (2023): 165–188 © 2024 约翰·霍普金斯大学出版社 亡灵生态学：乔治·桑德斯的林肯在中阴界和生态哥特式的局限性 埃里克·加里·安德森 乔治·梅森大学 简介：外部界限 正如伊丽莎白·帕克（Elizabeth Parker）所写，“E coGothic”是一个“羽翼未丰的术语”。1 尽管它很年轻，但它已经被证明是卓有成效的，很大程度上是因为它融合了生态批评的开放性和模糊性融入哥特式来描述一种令人不安、难以捉摸的“生态中心氛围”，这种氛围具有悠久的文学和文化影响力。2生态哥特式因此延伸了美国（而且，正如帕克所说的，跨国）哥特式，它本身是广阔的，“与其说是一种流派，不如说是一种流动的、无处不在的文学模式。”3 生态哥特式研究很快就开始了，有专门的学术期刊《哥特式自然》；该杂志的联合创始人兼联合编辑 Parker 撰写的专着；由 Dawn Keetley 和 Matthew Wynn Sivils 编辑的批评文章集；以及大量期刊文章和学术会议。正如帕克和联合编辑米歇尔·波兰在 2021 年出版的第二期《哥特式自然》的导言中宣布的那样，“我们生活在生态哥特式时代。”4 通过这一声明，帕克和波兰有效地使定义生态哥特式这一本已艰巨的挑战变得更加复杂。提出它不仅包含固定的空间位置（例如黑暗森林中的一座老房子），还包含更抽象、更广泛的时间坐标。但什么是“生态哥特时代”？将空间和时间同时视为生态和哥特式意味着什么？大卫·法里尔 (David Farrier) 在他最近对人类世诗学的研究中指出，人类世的定义是指人类对物理环境的影响，并进一步假设其“美国小说的时间性166研究”。 。 。是深深的威胁。它的广度令人困惑。”5法里尔接着表示，鬼魂和困扰的词汇可以帮助我们思考问题的广泛性，“我们的现在实际上与深刻的过去和过去相伴”的“令人不安”的方式。深刻的未来。”6 这些论点，以及对“生命与非生命之间的相互关系”的关注，7 也推动了编辑集《受损星球上的生活艺术》，该集分为“人类世的幽灵”和“人类世的怪物。”本卷的编辑们问道：“我们如何才能回到过去，更清楚地看到现在？我们把这种对多重过去的回归，无论是人类的还是非人类的，称为“幽灵”。每个景观都受到过去生活方式的困扰”，而且，似乎这还不够生态文化光谱，“人类景观也受到想象中的未来的困扰。”8这种方法不仅与当前的生态思维产生共鸣，也与乔治·桑德斯 (George Saunders) 的 2017 年观点产生共鸣。小说《林肯在中阴界》，它充满了鬼魂，锚定在一个非常具体的景观和一个非常具体的历史时刻，但在想象可能的未来时也具有时间流动性和慷慨性，最终摆脱了书中大部分动作所发生的有界的、成熟的生态空间。地点，华盛顿特区的橡树山公墓。9 巴尔多谈到了与生态研究相关的许多问题：生态恐惧的纠缠；种族困扰；奇怪的不死状态；跨肉体性；人类和环境机构的问题；身体恐怖；植物恐怖（尤其是恶魔卷须）；最终，我们提出了一个不可思议的国家，如果它真的成立，它将把白人和黑人、社会特权阶层和下层阶级、生者和不死者、过去和未来都纳入其中书挡上呈现的是 1862 年饱受战争蹂躏的叙事呈现。10《林肯在中阴界》因此将其鬼魂解读为过去和未来的公民。换句话说，这部小说中的鬼魂锚定在他们曾经完全活着的记忆中，并且也在走向不死机构的新想法，使他们能够在死后重新定义自己作为美国人。与此相关的是，我认为，生态哥特式在这部小说中以偶尔、闪烁的方式显现出来，作为众多流派和模式中的一种，而不是作为一种主导模式。就像书中的不死角色一样，生态哥特式......