The Poisoned Pond: Jan Carson’s Embodied Poetics and Politics of Ecosickness
In The Raptures, Jan Carson recounts the spread of a mysterious epidemic in a fictional Northern Irish town. As children are poisoned by unknown chemicals, the main plotline combines medical and criminal investigations, borrowing from the narrative codes of the whodunnit to trace the source of the l...
Guardado en:
| Publicado en: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Lenguaje: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumario: | In The Raptures, Jan Carson recounts the spread of a mysterious epidemic in a fictional Northern Irish town. As children are poisoned by unknown chemicals, the main plotline combines medical and criminal investigations, borrowing from the narrative codes of the whodunnit to trace the source of the lethal ecosickness (Houser). While the novel at times veers away from realism by staging a young girl’s conversations with the dead children’s ghosts, Carson puts materiality at the heart of the story by graphically depicting the physical and (micro)biological symptoms of the disease. As the children’s bodies are repeatedly compared to those of animals or to more than human entities and the source of contamination is identified in a nearby bog, the novel also acknowledges the effect of toxic exposure on the biosphere as a whole. Carson’s material realism—the minute description of the diseased bodies along with the organic and ecological consequences of chemical poisoning—opens up a space of reflection on the impact of the Capitalocene on human and non-human lives alike. The novel explores the toxicity of northern Ireland’s political and environmental ecosystems by foregrounding the vulnerable bodies of children. |
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