Ecogothic Dislocations in Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees

Abstract

This essay reads Hanya Yanagihara’s first novel as an example of postcolonial dark archaeology. Drawing from Timothy Morton’s dark ecology and Rob Nixon’s slow violence, I argue the figure of sexual abuse and exploitation complicates notions of pristine indigeneity and corrupt anthropology, critically confusing notions of cultural, physical and ideological pollution, contamination, discovery and knowledge.

• Dark ecology
• ecoGothic
• Hawai’i
• Yanagihara
• Hanya

ORCID

Eleanor Byrne http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1976-0897

Notes

1 Though he’s fictional, Perina works at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, and his perpetrator narrative is based on the real-life case of Dr Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, whose work on Kuru, a disease afflicting the South Fore people of Papua New Guinea, earned him a Nobel prize in 1976. Over his years of working on the disease, Gajdusek took 56 mostly male children back from his visits to Papua New Guinea and they lived with him in the United States as his adopted children. He was charged with child molestation in 1996, with his diary incriminating him. Gajdusek’s public disgrace intersects with Yanagihara’s private world as a child, and the aftershocks of the revelations: her father was a scientist working alongside Gajdusek in the 1950s. For Yanagihara, this is not merely an account of the disgrace of a symbolic man of science, it is an interrogation of the structures of meaning that she grew up with and the certainties that she steered her childhood by. “In my house Gajdusek was a hero. If you worked in virology, immunology, medical anthropology or paediatrics. He was one of these great colourful men of science. People really adored him” (Yanagihara 2015).