Appupen’s Posthuman Gothic: The Snake and the Lotus

Abstract

Appupen’s The Snake and the Lotus is a dystopic work that instantiates, the essay argues, a posthuman Gothic. The horror of this version of the Gothic is inaugurated by a collapsed world, and is Appupen’s first move. This environmental theme in the text, cast as an ecological Gothic, examines the transformation of the city into a monstrous structure. The second part of the essay turns to the reconfigurations of the human form and a monstrous sexuality. In the third section I argue that Appupen’s vision of this dystopia concludes with critical posthuman ecology, marked by coexistence and mutual dependence.

Keywords:

• Appupen
• graphic novel
• posthuman Gothic
• dystopia
• critical posthuman ecology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Figure 1. The dying green.

Figure 2. The labyrinthine factory.

Figure 3. The factory's product that covers all visible surface.

Figure 4. The lower city.

Figure 5. The posthuman.

Notes

1 Halahala is the Sanskrit word for the poison that apparently rose from the churning of the oceans, according to Hindu mythology. In Appupen, it is the name of an entire world.

2 Emphasis in original.

3 Schmeink uses Jerome Cohen’s definition to define this as “‘those sexual practices that must not be committed, or that may be committed only through the body of the monster’ (J. Cohen 14)” (142).

4 I have made the argument about this form of transhuman morality in an essay elsewhere.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pramod K. Nayar

Pramod K. Nayar’s most recent books include Bhopal’s Ecological Gothic: Disaster, Precarity and the Biopolitical Uncanny (2017), The Extreme in Contemporary Culture: States of Vulnerability (2017), Human Rights and Literature: Writing Rights (2016), and The Indian Graphic Novel: Nation, History and Critique (2016). His essays on graphic novels have appeared in Biography, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Image and Text, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, and various anthologies. Forthcoming works include Brand Postcolonial (de Gruyter Open Access), Ecoprecarity (Routledge), besides essays on celebrity studies, Fanon, genomics and culture, and graphic novels.