Close Reading - Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Hypnasport
Hypn: Greek word for Sleep
Transport: Take or movement from one place to another
Definition: The movement and navigation of realms in a semi-conscious to unconscious state
Within Silent Spring, the salient mode of eco-mimesis is utilised to directly bring Rachel Caron's world into the direct experience of the readers. The communication of a poetic ecological warning of human actions and its detrimental consequences in the environment can be interpreted through her gentle and romantic lenses. Carson's work is inspired from her personal experience with the industrial destruction of her hometown and her eye-opening work pays a humble homage or even a form of eulogy to the natural environment.
She begins with the eco-mimesis of the sea and presents the concept of extinction from the beginning of time, the historical markings of the sea imprinted on the landscape shapes a constantly changing scenery and evokes the notion of a non-constant state. The incoming and receding movement of the tides embodies the mimicking of inhaling and exhalation of the human lungs, "it rises or falls as the glaciers melt or grow(...) the shore has a dual nature". Here, Carson also critiques post-human notions of duality through the depiction of the tides imitating the motion of breathing, here, she attempts to disintegrate the structural barriers between nature and cultures. The strong presence of extinction and hynasport is interweaved in the following paragraph, the hynasportation begins with Carson's entry into the romantic realm, she evokes the powerful nexus and relationship of the ecological community using an imaginary string as a entangled mesh connected to the different species. Her hypnasportation allows her to transcend the sphere of reality and navigate into various boundaries in an unconscious state. The absence of harsh scientific jargon and repetitive argument ushers the audience into the dream-like hallucination, spell bound by the manipulation of her calm tone and rhetorical devices.
Additionally, Carson wanders through multiple gateways in her unconscious voyage, she hypnasports through the interweaving worlds and enters the mesmerising limbo between the unconscious and hallucination. The deep hypnotic power of hynpasportation pulls audiences into a marginal state of existence, balancing the in-between suspensions with the imagined and reality, audiences are pulled into unending frame and question of existence. Carson directly narrates her hypnasportation, "Enchanted place on the threshold of the sea (...) far from the land world I had left...", here, she communicates the threshold of the human existence and the imaginary as a separate experience. The illustration of post-dualism is highlighted using the borders of the real and fantasy world. The motif of birds through the passage, "Loud urgent cry (...) birds became only dark shadows (...) across the beach like little ghosts", evokes the message of sterility and extinction through the continued usage of DDT and harmful toxins. More deeply, the notion of sterility with the birds does not only define the halt in biological reproduction but also the fragmentation of human and non-human relationships relating to eradication of the web of life (Maxwell). The sudden eerie turn and visual description of the fading birds foreshadows the domino-like pattern of a fading eco-system and thus extinction.
The nightfall in The Marginal World elicits a different realm, Carson uncovers the magic of dusk in her encounter with the ghost crabs. The powerful imagery she conjures with, " Time was suspended, the world I belonged did not exist and I might have been an onlooker from outer space.", Carson describes the hypnasportation into the pre-human existence, the soul-less ghostly entities watching the ghost crab as a spiritual onlooker. This mirror of the human-less watching the single ghost crab among the vast watery landscape symbolises a premonition of the beginning and the end of all existence. Ideas of extinction usurps through the soothing language like a shark fin sticking out of the horizontal waters, Carson paints a vivid description of the lonely silhouette of the ghost crab to create a reflection and raise awareness of human destruction in the modern climate. The pervasiveness of climate change and on-going pollution can also be interpreted through, "The spiral shells of other snails (...) left winding tracks in the mud as they moved about in search for food", the alliteration of the letter 'S' is deliberate in sounding out and portraying the winded trajectory of the snails, they also serve the function in phonetically communicating the interconnectedness of the myriad of relations with the natural and human world.
In conjunction, Carson attempts to conclude her message via the repetition of, "Sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden", her hypnasportation becomes a medium to enter into the natural world in a unbreakable cycle in order to re-do and possibly un-do the harm humans have left. Her message echoes an ecological crisis where a call of shared responsibility, vulnerability and care comes into question (Cielemęcka and Christine). In order to understand and solve "the riddle", Carson demonstrates the blending of past and present, the temporal timeline of extinction is twisted in a way where death marks the a pillar for the future and the future depends on the present. She expresses the continuance of the evolution in the contemporary timelines and the dangerous realities our co-inhabitants faces in the natural world.
Reference:
Lida Maxwell. “Queer/Love/Bird Extinction: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as a Work of Love.” Political Theory, vol. 45, no. 5, SAGE Publications, 2017, pp. 682–704, doi:10.1177/0090591717712024.
Cielemęcka, Olga, and Daigle, Christine. “Posthuman Sustainability: An Ethos for Our Anthropocenic Future.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 36, no. 7-8, SAGE Publications, 2019, pp. 67–87, doi:10.1177/0263276419873710.