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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the entanglement of narrative and nature through the lens of sensory ecology, focusing on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s "The Mines of Falun" and its illustrated adaptation by artist Natalie Frank, whose synesthetically-informed paintings destabilize a whole host of binary distinctions.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the entanglement of narrative and nature through the lens of sensory ecology, focusing on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s "The Mines of Falun" (translated by Jack Zipes) and its 2023 illustrated adaptation by artist Natalie Frank. Hoffmann’s tale stages a descent into the mineral depths of the earth, where the boundaries between the natural and supernatural, the living and the dead, dissolve. The mine becomes a narrative space shaped by elemental forces—earth, water, and time—where identity is reconfigured through contact with the non-human world.

Informed by her experience of "extreme synesthesia," which ties "together numbers, letters, colors, opera and dance with painting, as well as narrative in literature," Natalie Frank's illustrations reimagine this descent as a multisensory encounter. Her visual language—marked by vibrant color, texture, and emotional intensity—translates Hoffmann’s narrative into a sensorial ecology, where perception itself becomes a mode of storytelling. This paper argues that Frank’s synesthetic imagery destabilizes binary distinctions between nature and culture, human and non-human, surface and depth. In doing so, it offers a visual narrative that examines non-binary nature-cultural assemblages and the ways in which narrative is shaped by, and shapes, the living world.

By reading Hoffmann’s tale alongside Frank’s illustrations, this paper proposes that "The Mines of Falun" becomes not just a story about nature, but a story told through nature—through its textures, rhythms, and sensory intensities. It invites us to consider how narrative might function as a commons of perception, where ecological and aesthetic experiences converge.