”Min tröst var att författa en egen artikel om svamparna”

Fiktiva gestaltningar av relationer mellan fungi och människor

Abstract

“My Consolation was to Write my Own Article on Fungi”: Fictional Representations of the Relationship Between Fungi and Humans

This article explores fictional representations of fungi, understanding them as a materialization of theoretical ideas about the entangled relationships between humans and the more-than-human, central to humanistic and philosophical thinkers within the nonhuman turn. The point of departure is the growing interest in fungi over the last decades, scientifically and, more recently, also in arts and culture. To frame the discussion historically, concepts from ethnomycology is used as a background, describing cultural tendencies and attitudes towards fungi in terms of mycophobia and mycophilia. The American HBO-series The Last of Us (2023) is discussed as an example of the contemporary boom, using Anna Tsing’s ideas on fungi as a representation of multi-species collaboration in the era of capitalist destruction. The story raises questions about individuality, represented by the human, as opposed to the collective fungus. The main focus of the article is, however, a Swedish context and two prose narratives in which fungi play a significant role, Agneta Pleijel’s historical novel Fungi. En roman om kärleken (Fungi. A Novel on Love, 1993) and Lars Jakobson’s fantastic story “Nians nät över trapetsen” (“The Nine Net over the Trapezius”, 2004). In the postapocalyptic world of The Last of Us, the fungus is a dangerous parasite portrayed with horror and ambivalence. In Pleijel’s and Jakobsons’s stories the lives of fungi are associated with harmony, even joy. In different ways, their human characters relate to fungi with love and reverence, and strive to fully understand their nature. Nevertheless, all three stories raise questions about interspecies entanglements. The wonders and horrors of symbiosis that they portray point towards the complex condition of the anthropocene and the limits of a mechanistic worldview.