Hounded out of Time Black Shuck’S Lesson in the Anthropocene
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Hounded Out of Time Black Shuck’s Lesson in the Anthropocene JONATHAN WOOLLEY Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK Abstract Drawing in nightmares, shadows, and loneliness, this article follows a rarely trod- den and difficult path across the shifting geology of Norfolk, a track marked by fleeting glimpses and horrible signs of the deadly consequences of deep time and human choice. A subject of fascination for folklorists, cryptozoologists, and the general public alike, in East Anglia stories abound of a huge, devilish hound, with saucer-shaped eyes and followed by the demonic stench of Sulphur: Black Shuck. This ethnographic description, of pursuit by— rather than of—footprints in the mud, whispered stories from isolated places, and the mys- teriously mutilated corpses of deer considers the significance of encounters with this phan- tasm for recent debates surrounding the proper understanding of the beginning of the Anthropocene and the implications of this for our sense time and responsibility. In this era of unprecedented human power over the natural world, the Shuck—themeresightof whom brings death—still haunts us; his chthonic presence reminding us of the inexorable yet unpredictable power of death. By attending the monstrous, spectral ambiguity of the Shuck and his ability to reformulate the landscape of East Anglia as a social space, this arti- cleexploreshowthecoevalqualityofthelongue durée of deep time, and the haunting rup- ture entailed by the prospect of our own mortality, can enchant, rather than blunt, our sense of human responsibility in the Anthropocene. Keywords Chthulucene, Anthropocene, death, folklore, Norfolk, climate change, haunting And where they all lay sleeping The Dog lies panting down The fire of forests burning in his eyes Whilst darkly in the churchyard The silence sets around And time itself dissolves within his guise. —Martin Newell, Black Shuck ne of the fiercely contested aspects of the Anthropocene is its boundary with the O preceding epoch, the Holocene. A relatively warm, stable, interglacial phase of the Earth system, the Holocene has sustained much of human history. It contrasts sharply Environmental Humanities 10:1 (May 2018) DOI 10.1215/22011919-4385580 © 2018 Jonathan Woolley This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/10/1/295/557770/295woolley.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 296 Environmental Humanities 10:1 / May 2018 with the Anthropocene—a proposed but as yet unsettled division of the geologic record— wherein unprecedented human activity renders the Earth system unstable and unpre- dictable. Whether we should conceive of the boundary between the two as the product of a recent rupture caused by industrialization or as the result of a more gradual pro- cess, with its machinations unfolding over deeper timescales, is open to debate.1 It may be said that the movement from a state of well-acquainted certainty to one of chronic disturbance raises the specter, or specters, of the uncanny: that which was once familiar but is no longer.2 Such uncanny apparitions reflect the powerful, haunting affects with which spaces of ruination and loss are charged.3 I detected one such specter during my research: the phantom dog known as Black Shuck—a terrifying, infernal black hound who haunts the roads and wild places of East Anglia. Whenever he ap- pears, the Shuck portends death and calamity; those who witness him will be bereaved or die themselves soon after. By following the traces left by this horrifying apparition, I suggest, perspective can be gained on what Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald refer to as the “deflationary move” toward the Anthropocene. Hamilton and Grinevald allege that in locating the Holocene-Anthropocene transition across longer timescales, the sig- nificance of that transition is blunted.4 “In so doing,” they write, [this] ‘gradualizes’ the new epoch so that it is no longer a rupture due principally to the burning of fossil fuels but a creeping phenomenon due to the incremental spread of human influence over the landscape. This misconstrues the suddenness, severity, dura- tion and irreversibility of the Anthropocene leading to a serious underestimation and mischaracterization of the kind of human response necessary to slow its onset and ame- liorate its impacts.”5 As such, their claim is that “[the nature of the Anthropocene as a] rupture means that the Holocene can be no guide to the Anthropocene geologically or intellectually.”6 Regardless of the validity of Hamilton and Grinevald’s broader argument about stratigraphic matters, the rhetorical tension they establish—between sudden rupture and the longue durée of human activity—makes for a valuable point of departure. It raises important questions about how human beings categorize and respond to pro- cesses of change in their lives and surroundings. As one of the “chthonic ones” identi- fied by Donna Haraway,7 the Shuck, with his intimate relationship with both death and 1. see Ruddiman, “Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis,” 7–10; Angus and Foster, Facing the Anthropocene; Colebrook, “We Have Always Been Post-Anthropocene”; Schneiderman, “Anthropocene Controversy”,and Hamilton, “The Anthropocene as Rupture.”“Machinations” here refers to the efforts of early agricultural socie- ties, who felled trees to prepare the land for agriculture and altered various geologic processes as a result. 2. Long, “Haunting Malayness.” 3. Navaro-Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects.” 4. Hamilton and Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?” 5. Ibid., 66–67. 6. Ibid., 60. 7. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/10/1/295/557770/295woolley.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Woolley / Black Shuck’s Lesson in the Anthropocene 297 the shifty soils of East Anglia, challenges any strict oppositions between moments of rupture, human memory, and the deep fastness of geologic time. Consider Haraway’s description of these chthonic ones: Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the-minute. I imagine chthonic ones as replete with tentacles, feelers, dig-its, cords, whiptails, spider legs, and very un- ruly hair. Chthonic ones romp in multi critter humus but have no truck with sky-gazing Homo. Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense; they demonstrate and perform the material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters. They also demonstrate and perform consequences. Chthonic ones are not safe; they have no truck with ideologues; they belong to no-one; they writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names in all the airs, waters, and places of earth. They make and unmake; they are made and unmade. They are who are. No wonder the world’s great monotheisms in both religious and secular guises have tried again and again to exterminate the chthonic ones. The scandals of times called the Anthropo- cene and the Capitalocene are the latest and most dangerous of these exterminating forces.8 One of the key attributes of the Shuck, by all accounts, is his coat: thick, heavy, and long. Indeed, one of the proposed etymologies for the name “Shuck” is the local dialect word shucky, meaning “hairy” or “shaggy”—the alternative being the Old English scucca, meaning “demon.” Indeed, in some of the stories, he is referred to as “Shucky Dog.” Like other chthonic beings, the Shuck is an enemy of God and the Church. He is not just a deathly apparition but a dirty one—a shaggy dog in many shapes and many places. Therefore, the Shuck is here a “demon familiar,” thoroughly rooted in marshy East Anglian places where I lived and worked but with routes elsewhere.9 Unlike Pimoa cthulhu10—whose many legs trace those routes in Haraway’s writing—it is the tentacular hairs of the Shucky Dog’s shaggy coat (and the shaggy-dog tales about him)11 that allow us to feel our way through discordant temporalities and engage in tentacular thinking about the past, present, and future. As Kate Shipley Coddington points out, the analytic of haunting foregrounds connections between the past and present.12 The lesson that the ghost Black Shuck teaches us, I suggest, is that it is through present moments of sud- den rupture—calamity and death—that we are confronted by the deep past at its most terrifying. Nor do these ruptures remain bounded within discrete events; because of their unpredictability, they bleed through our experience of the Earth in place and time. Rather than lull us into a false sense of security, as feared by Hamilton and Grine- vald, this type of anticipation of Anthropocene crises haunts us with the uncontrollable, 8. Ibid., 2; emphasis added. 9. Ibid., 31. 10. A spider found in the forests of Northern California, near to where Donna Haraway herself lives. 11. Shaggy-dog tale is a slang term for a long, often fanciful story that does not necessarily have a satisfy- ing conclusion. 12. Coddington, “Spectral Geographies”; see also Saltmarsh, “Haunting Concepts in Social Research.” Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article-pdf/10/1/295/557770/295woolley.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 298 Environmental Humanities 10:1 / May 2018 unintended consequences of our actions. As David Matless points out in his detailed survey of cultural life in the Broads—the coastal, wetland region of Norfolk on the East- ern edge of England where the Shuck dwells—this area is frequently a site of heated discussion over authentic regional conduct and the physical consequences of human activity,13 a theme also explored by other social scientists working in the region.14 My discussion here continues in this vein, but deals with the inhuman—rather than human—features of the Broads, attending to the “geographical particularity” of this apparition.15 I see the Shuck as a tentacular critter that haunts marshy morasses at the edges of human understanding16 and, in the heart of the East Anglian countryside, as a constant reminder of the uncontrollable dimensions to such places.