is where all that matters does happen, that man and external reality are so involved with one another that for man’s purposes they had better be taken as one.42
By utilising this view of subjectivity, Prynne has defined the temporal relationship of the wounded subject’s relation to the outside world as reflective of possibilities of the self. The liminal boundaries of the subject are exemplified as fulfilling both personal and external conditions. Another definition of the phrase Wound Response, originally identified by Anthony Mellors, is that “Wound Response” is a botanical term which designates a plant’s reaction to an external trauma.43 The establishment of this idea necessitates the reading of “Plant Time Manifold” and “The Rune Poem” alongside of Wound Response, to complete a comprehensive pattern. According to Mellors, the structural reaction implicit in this response, entails both intercellular and extracellular reactions. The function of reaction unifies the natural and the human, by exemplifying the mimetic relationship with which plants and humans react to wounds. While forgoing accession to a singular cognitive definition, Prynne utilises the idea of multiplicity by giving contextual connotations that Wound Response could also mean a complex array of physiological and biochemical reactions occurring when a plant is injured.44 The active response of a plant that has experienced trauma entails a series of physiological and cellular processes which allow wound interaction with the external environment while the immediate reactionary process is initiated. The immediacy of this reaction presumes, “a detecting mechanism [which] must integrate across the population,” providing a synaptic-like response which ensures that in regards to wound reaction, “First 42 Chalres Olson, et al., Collected Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 161. 43 Mellors, “Mysteries of the Organism: Conceptual Models and J.H. Prynne’s Wound Response.” 44 A.R. Biggs, Anatomical and Physiological Responses of Bark Tissues to Mechanical Injury (University of West Virginia, Plant and Soil Science Division, 1992): http://www.caf.wvu.edu/bark/angiospe1.htm#Anatomy%20of%20Wou nd%20Response%20in%20Bark. A preliminary search on the topic of wound response lends the reader the following explanation, as expressed by the Plant and Soil Science division of the University of West Virginia:These responses may be categorised into immediate or rapid responses (depolarised of cell membranes, release of host or pathogen cell wall fragments) which occur within seconds or minutes after wounding and slow responses (eg. complex biosynthetic reactions, formation of boundary tissues) which occur over a period of hours, days or weeks.
intentions are the cleanest,” then, “local numbness starts to spread”(223). The immediate reaction to the wound is an episodic blockage of receptor sites, dulling the subject to “the crisis ahead,” by creating lignified tissue which “cancels the flux link” ensuring that “his recall is false” (227, 223). The injured subject’s cellular response works by blocking apperceptive reactions to the proceeding recovery, as well as to the furtherance of the wound’s physiological effects. This is also reiterated by the claim that, “necrophylactic periderms, which include wound periderms […] are thought to protect living tissues from the adverse effects of cell death,” a numbing of the senses which, “feels wet streaking down tree bark ”(231).45 Mellors continues his botanist reading of “Of Movement Towards a Natural Place,” when he writes: Prynne makes the human significance of the wound tremble. Thus when the subject “rises like a plaque to the sun,” he mimes the action of the plants; but he doesn’t photosynthesize like the plants, being in danger from the sun as well as needing its sustenance (thus the doubleness of “melanism” which, as natural skin pigmentation gives protection from the sun’s rays, but is otherwise harmful: “The force for existence/composes a colony of black spots.”) (219).46
This basic description details the wound as subject to shock, being surrounded by beneficial periderms which will encourage closure, but have the affect of dulling the site of the trauma. Simulating human reactions, the plant’s response to trauma is to impair sensory uptake to the wound and allows the cellular reactions a corresponding periderm response to protect the spot where damage occurred. The occurrence of melanin damage doubles back to “Pigment Depot,” where “the force of existence composes a colony of black spots” (221).47 The cellular response initiates the healing process which marks, “the entry condition a daze,” 45 Biggs, Plant Wound Response. 46 Mellors, “Mysteries of the Organism: Conceptual Models and J.H. Prynne’s Wound Response.” 242. 47 Here individual moments of trauma comprise the ‘black spots’ of traumatic aphasia on the subject’s memory. This is also indicative of the diachronic approach with which Friend investigates Prynne’s overlaying of the internal and external, in the creation of landscape pictures which initially correspond to the body, as reproduced by magnetic resonance image.
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