Area X Five Years Later

In this essay, I read Jeff VanderMeer’s acclaimed The SouThern reach Trilogy (2014) as a dramatic reimagining of the body and health in the context of the global ecological crisis. I propose that a particularly “weird” ecology is one explicitly linked to modes of embodiment specific to the environmental conditions of the twenty-first century; the novels stage environmental crisis not only in the marshes and coastlines of a strange fictional ecosystem but in the body itself. As a primary organizing theme of the series, sickness inhabits human and nonhuman bodies, imbricating them in complex relations that reveal their co-constitution. In this essay, I examine the intersection of eco-criticism, feminist science studies, and disability studies, which together illuminate in the Trilogy the ways in which the body is embroiled in climate change as a set of relations imagined as a form of ecosickness.

This article reads Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) through the perspective of the parasite. By analyzing two characters’ responses to parasitic invasion by an alien life form, this article explores the ethical and affective charge of living through the consequences of blurred boundaries between human and nonhuman, earth and extraterrestrial, life and nonlife, self and other. While parasites are generally considered with fear and revulsion, the trilogy’s engagement with parasitic networks as a fact of ecological entanglement rather than as an exceptional occurrence significantly contributes to rethinking responses to infection and contamination beyond invasion and defense.

The book SOUTHERN PANORAMAS | PERSPECTIVES FOR OTHER GEOGRAPHIES OF THOUGHT (Edições SESC) edited by Sabrina Moura, explores the notion of Global South as an axis of thought and knowledge production. Conceived as an anthology of texts, the book features contributions from various disciplines and offers a critical perspective on the formation of the concept of South. "Over the last twenty years, the South expands on a global level, configuring a map of historical and political experiences that have refused to keep within hemispheric lines. If its uses sometimes incur in the contradictions inherent in binary thought, they also indicate new and complex flows of economic, cultural and symbolic capital", says Sabrina, who brought together works of artists Joaquin Torres-Garcia and Cildo Meireles, philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe, researcher and writer Ana Longoni, art critic Geeta Kapur, among others. By presenting essays, historical documents and manifestos, the publication features debates previously unpublished in Portuguese — as the work of South African anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff on Southern theories — and translates into English reference texts written by Brazilian authors, such as Spatiotemporal relations in the developing world, written by the geographer Milton Santos in 1976 during his exile in Paris. From the claims of non-aligned countries that gained strength during the Cold War to the emergence of post-colonial thought and its critique, the publication offers an important contribution to the debates that question the validity of Eurocentric representations and narratives.

22 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER Reflections on Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy On Not Returning Home, an Introduction Alison Sperling Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin FIVE years after the publication of Jeff VanderMeer’s widely acclaimed Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, 2014) and following the adaptation of the first book into a feature length Hollywood film (dir. Alex Garland, 2018), Area X continues to seduce and confound those who encounter it. The trilogy has now been translated into dozens of languages, and in addition to a number of works of fiction forthcoming, including his anticipated next novel Dead Astronauts (with a publication date of December, 2019), VanderMeer’s influence particularly after Area X seems to be spreading well outside of his books, with projects also contracted and underway for television and the big screen. This cluster of five contributions, curated at the invitation of Science Fiction Research Association Review, is a project that reflects on the cultural, historical, political, and philosophical life of the trilogy since its publication and contemplates what kind of staying power the novels continue to have, and in which registers, into the future. It also, then, continues to probe the genre, aesthetics, politics, ethics of the Weird, a category that, as SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 23 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER many in this cluster will allude to, always seems to resist categorization; a process of coming to unknow rather than one that arrives at an understanding. But these short pieces also seem to collectively recognize the inadequacy of leaving our interpretation with weirdness there, for, as a number of the authors here point out, to romanticize the weirdness of becomingother can too quickly become a dangerous escapist fantasy. Even though the writers here acknowledge the allure and seduction of Area X, their reflections decidedly choose not acquiesce to a politics (environmental or otherwise) of acceptance or non-complicity. It is, perhaps, five years of distance from the trilogy and now in a radically different global, increasingly authoritarian and right-wing political climate, that I would argue marks in these reflections a shift in the study of VanderMeer and in scholarship on the Weird. At the end of Annihilation, the biologist makes a decision: “I am not going home,” she writes. I’ve always been fascinated with this decision of hers, not because I think I would do it differently, but because it can be read as a response to so many things: her finding pleasure or joy in what she is becoming, her sense that she has nothing left on the outside with her husband gone, or her knowing that there really is no longer an outside, at least not for much longer. A decision like the biologist’s, what we might call after Donna Haraway “staying with the trouble,” is one many have already had to face, those who already or have long lived, for example, in impossible landscapes ravaged by extractavism or contaminated by toxic waste, spaces haunted by related colonial legacies of genocide, those in which communities and livelihoods have already been altered or are under imminent threat by the effects of climate change. The Southern Reach Trilogy is a story that begins with a woman who decides to enter and indeed stay in the ruins of the Anthropocene, to see what she will become. Not everyone is able to make such a choice, but the trilogy continues to ignite discussion and speculation about what might become of humanity, and at what cost. 24 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER Mediating VanderMeer’s Area X Bethany Doane Pennsylvania State University IT is strange to think that five years could have forced such dramatic change in our cultural, political, and academic climate. But what bubbled below the surface of things in 2014 has exploded into what feels like political cataclysm by 2019. Hope seems somewhat childish now. Grab the ones you love and hold them close. We’re all going down. Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X trilogy (2014) also hinges its affective power on a kind of slow apocalyptic inevitability, albeit one shaped much more by beauty and wonder than political assault. His is an aesthetic undoing, a beautiful dissolution of self and structure. Is there such thing as a utopian apocalypse? If so, it is surely not the one that appears on the horizon now, the slow burn of perpetual violence and man-made climate change fueled by the headlong screeching plunge of capitalism’s final attempts to sustain itself on a fast-emptying tank. VanderMeer’s novels, by contrast, offer readers a gentle, planetary euthanasia that is marked by some horror, yes, but also by fascination and wonder. Death by absorption. By transformation. Perhaps he saw the coming need for this particularly healing fantasy. These novels, and their 2018 film adaptation in Alex Garland’s Annihilation, sit at an essential conjunction in the present of an impulse toward aestheticism and the theoretical compulsion to negate, elide, or destroy the human. Rather than the prototypical apocalypse narrative that emphasizes the stories of survivors, the Southern Reach trilogy envisions a preapocalyptic scenario that promises to be both beautiful and complete: there will be nothing human left to observe this final, marvelous transformation. If theories of the Anthropocene suggest that one consider extinction as a concrete possibility, Area X appears to present an ideal version of that eventual destruction: a disinterested intrusion from the outside that renders humanity blameless. The alien force of Area X promises to return the entire planet to an idyllic prelapsarian past, wiping away the sins of “the human” in a kind of deus ex natura. Humanity will be sacrificed for the sake of reversing its trespasses. The process of this dissolution seems wonderous and enchanting as revealed through the words of the Biologist, who imagines her eventual destruction as a “melt[ing] into the landscape” (128). Depersonalized and dehumanized, this end of the world is also very much depoliticized: it swallows all of history along with all its guilt. After this ecological euthanasia, there will be no trace left of humanity’s worst crimes. Would that we could all become leviathan or tree- SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 25 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER forms, rather than face up to the violence and traumas of history. By depoliticizing the story’s coming apocalypse, VanderMeer’s trilogy draws critical attention to the dangers of both aestheticism and “the nonhuman” as solutions to contemporary crises, both in the culture of late capitalism and within emergent critical theory in the humanities, especially in vital materialisms that romanticize human-nonhuman entanglements. Were it not for the horror that accompanies the beautiful dissolution in these texts, they might too easily be read as complicit with escapist, annihilative fantasies. But, importantly, Area X and Annihilation are full of deliberate lies and misrepresentations, tricks and deceptions that belie this interpretation. The beauty of the place, of the language, is a façade to which VanderMeer persistently draws attention, because nothing is as it seems in this place. Technological instruments cannot function properly. Microscopes don’t show what they should. The Biologist reveals, partway through her narrative, that she is unreliable: she has lied to the reader about her purpose, her identity, as has the Psychologist, and as do others. Time lies, instruments lie, perceptions lie about what “really” exists in Area X. Perhaps this is not a beautiful place. Perhaps it is a horror, dressed in idyllic landscape. Perhaps erasing “the human,” involves producing the same violent suffering that it attempts to evade by disappearing at the moment of its political and historical reckoning. VanderMeer never shows his readers the screaming chaos as Area X’s border approaches; the trauma of crossing the threshold into its annihilative space is redacted. When, in the final pages of the third book, Ghost Bird finally encounters the Crawler deep within the tower/tunnel, she thinks of its infectious script, “Each word a world, a world bleeding through from some other place, a conduit and an entry point [….] Each sentence a merciless healing, a ruthless rebuilding that could not be denied” (555). The words that the Crawler writes on the walls deceive: they promise meaning, intention, purpose, in their lyric composition (Where lies the strangling fruit…), but they offer none. They are material inscriptions, and their medium of inscription acts—it reproduces whatever entity Area X is through some kind of infection or transmission—but the words themselves have no occult purpose, and they signify no great truth. These failures of language to signify, failures of mediation and translation and even perception, are essential to the story of Area X. Both the crawler’s script and VanderMeer’s romantic language seem to be deManian self-deconstructing texts: their words are aesthetically compelling, but their aestheticism only draws attention to their inability to capture reality or meaning. They reveal their own lie, and the gaping void of meaning behind them becomes the source of both horror and critique: fantasies of beautiful dissolution and annihilation will not make the processes 26 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER of extinction any less violent or painful. Behind what you perceive is not an answer, but absolute indifference: the inhuman. Rather than a “merciless healing,” Garland’s film plays out vital materiality through the metaphor of disease, particularly cancer. Here, Area X is “the shimmer,” and it functions as a pathology, malignant and tumorous. The film opens with the biologist Lena showing her class an image of dividing cervical cancer cells. She tells her students about “the rhythm of the dividing pair,” which, she says, produced all life on earth—a clear foreshadowing of Area X’s refracted, divided cells that will reproduce and transform all landscape and life within it. Much later, inside the lighthouse womb, an alien cervix opens and absorbs Lena’s blood, like semen, to reproduce her. The alien reads her, even as she tries and fails to make sense of it, and creates a divided pair: one original, one copy, perhaps slightly modified. “I don’t know what it wants. Or if it wants,” Lena says. The entity is machinic and indifferent, reading and transducing, copying and refracting and creating without intention. It is indifferent, animate materiality, like cancer. In moving from text to screen, it would be impossible to capture VanderMeer’s emphasis on language and its unreliability, but the adaptation still manages to convey the lie of aesthetics in other ways. The most notable of these occurs in what is perhaps the best scene of the film, during the “bear” attack in the abandoned house. This bear, if it is a bear (its shape is distorted, its skull partially exposed), has already killed Cassie Shepard, and it enters the house screaming with her voice, her final words trapped in the uncomprehending animal’s throat. The emptiness behind that bear’s imitated words, the stolen “Help me!” that was ripped from the throat of another and repeated as accidental deception, is the most terrifying moment of the film. Those words are the auditory equivalent of the crawler’s meaningless script that is bound to endless repetition. The bear’s scream is both material inscription and empty signifier. It is a meaningless lie, and behind it there is only the indifference of Area X. The gap between words and lack of meaning reveals the contingent and subjective, the accidental, nature of the landscape’s beauty. This place is not what it seems. Garland’s film will probably not live longer, in terms of cultural staying power, than the novels, but it does amplify their message in a way that deserves acknowledgement. So much of the Southern Reach Trilogy is about (failed) mediation, failed translation, that it would be ironic not to recognize what those themes look like when transferred to another medium. What gets lost in translation, modified and morphed, broken on repetition from novel to screen, can only drive home its points. Area X lulls and comforts with its beautiful SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 27 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER ecology and its romantic language; its form hypnotizes and compels, even as its content horrifies, or even worse, suggests a horror that cannot even be conveyed through language, visuals, or sound. If anything, the desire for “escape” seems even more pressing in 2019 than it did five years ago, though it also seems less and less possible. There is nowhere to go. There is no second planet, no place on earth untouched by the evils of capitalism or environmental catastrophe or human-historical violence. And even if there were, how aware we are now of the selfishness of such a choice to escape or erase one’s guilt. Would we instead have intervention from the stars to wipe our sins clean? Would we choose the lie of a beautiful slow death, melting into landscapes, blood turning to leaves, growing a thousand eyes to watch the world as a monster who could no longer be considered a self? Would we choose this, knowing we could also end up as a terrified scream on repeat in the mouth of a notquite-bear? Works Cited Annihilation. Directed by Alex Garland. Paramount Pictures, 2018. VanderMeer, Jeff. Area X: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. 28 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER Annihilation and the Historicity of Horror Benjamin J. Robertson University of Colorado, Boulder I have had numerous opportunities to suggest Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction to people both within and without academia, and when people ask where they should start there is really only one answer: Annihilation. Yes, the Ambergris books are very much worth reading, as are the Veniss texts. Yes, there is a lot of great short fiction. Borne is amazing, as is The Strange Bird. But the Southern Reach Trilogy stands apart from the rest, especially its first volume Annihilation, which I often refer to as “perfect” when discussing the novel. On one hand, this perfection is easy to describe: Annihilation is both very simple and very complex, short and easy to read yet capable of provoking complex thoughts and conversations. In just under 200 pages, VanderMeer imagines a world both immense and claustrophobic, aesthetically terrifying and strangely beautiful. When people read it, they often feel the creepiness and get what he’s doing without needing to go any further. If they want to go further, Annihilation gives them opportunity to consider genre, catastrophic climate change, the relationship of the monstrous to the human, the nature of writing, the limitations of science, the majesty and horror of nature, and so on. For these reasons, Annihilation may be one of the best pedagogical texts I have ever had the chance to offer to students, alongside, for example, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. As with Beloved, Annihilation makes its themes and concerns available on its surface to inexperienced readers even as it rewards the careful attention and deeper reading practices deployed by more advanced ones. Its points are both obvious and subtle, clear and occult: amenable to a single read or manifold encounters. For this reason, I recommend it to anyone who asks me about what to read next—whether they’re undergrad or grad students, fans of science fiction and horror or connoisseurs of “serious” literature—without fear that they might get stuck in it because of its length or uncompromising difficulty. On the other hand, there is a certain ineffability to Annihilation’s perfection. We might consider this ineffability through one of its greatest creations, the biologist, whose love for her husband is genuine despite her lack of need for him or any other human companionship, which is revealed to be her defining characteristic. Her experience of “the brightness” and her encounter with the Crawler may effect her obvious transformation into monstrous things, both Ghost Bird and the massive thing we briefly glimpse near the SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 29 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER end of Acceptance. However, this odd affective juxtaposition suggests the irreducibility of her weirdness before she ever enters Area X. Moreover, it mirrors the affect the reader encounters in Area X and thereby ramifies the weirdness the text seeks to manifest. Like the wailing creature the eleventh expedition hears—“so utterly human and inhuman, that, for a second time since entering Area X, I considered the supernatural”—or the Crawler itself— containing the face of the lighthouse keeper who stares out at the biologist in “ecstasy”—the biologist stands at the border of a conventional human world and some other, weirder realm (VanderMeer 139, 186). The human world values spousal love to the point of requiring humans, especially women, to lose themselves in it and simultaneously forbids a liquidation of the self that leaves such values behind. In the other, weirder realm such values no longer manifest or matter. The biologist, the wailing creature, the Crawler/lighthouse keeper: these entities (I hesitate to call them characters in the conventional, modern sense of the term): each has been, is, or will be something inhuman even as each retains some inscrutable, weird connection with the human. Importantly, Annihilation does not offer anyone the power to choose. The border already exists everywhere and the transformation is always already taking place. At the same time, it does not understand this lack of choice as a lack of power: what disempowers one world empowers another. These entities do not wish to return to what they were even as they intuit all they have lost. There is terror in Annihilation, but there is something hopeful in annihilation as well. And it’s this affect, so off-putting when spelled out as such and yet so welcoming to the reader of Annihilation, that bespeaks the novel’s ineffable perfection. It does not so much offer a perfect representation of an historical moment as it offers an affect uniquely suited to such a moment, one in which the world as we know seems to be slipping away, requiring us to come to new understandings of what we are or should be and what our values in this new circumstance might look like. In the space remaining to me here I want to approach this issue by way of John Clute’s writings on horror, first with regard to what Clute calls “affect horror” and the problems thereof, and second by way of what he calls “revel,” the climactic moment in the ideal horror narrative. With regard to affect horror, Clute tells us that “No other genre [but horror] has ever been defined in terms of the affect it generates in the reader.” For all the difficulties scholars and other readers have defining science fiction and fantasy, this difficulty rarely results from a generalization about how or what these genres make readers feel. Both genres may create wonder in the reader, but we have no problem understanding a text as science fiction or fantasy if it fails to do so. But a certain understanding of horror insists that a 30 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER story that fails to produce some type of fear, or one that does not seek to do so at any rate, must surely fall outside of the genre. For Clute, however, it’s foolish to say that any story that produces a feeling of fear or horror must be included within the genre. Readers of fantasy may feel fear for characters in dire straits and readers of thrillers may feel fear in tense moments that nonetheless exclude conventions (such as the monster or black magic) often associated with horror. As such, to take horror seriously is to define it according to something other than affect. Clute writes, “Horror (in this [affective] understanding) is a kind of afflatus, a wind from anywhere” (Clute 9). In short, when we understand horror in terms of affect, when we simply place what scares us into this generic category, we condemn it being utterly subjective, without any specificity or particularity beyond the whims of its readership. Clute’s analysis of affect horror is more nuanced than these two short quotes and my summary suggest. It’s nonetheless clear that Clute does not believe that horror can or should be defined by the feelings it produces in its readers. Rather, Clute favors definitions of horror, fantasy, and science fiction that feature accounts of their narrative structures and their development out of eighteenth-century understandings of science and history. However, it’s here that the “wind from anywhere” criticism—that anything can be horror if it scares us—falls flat, namely because affect itself, and therefore the affect called horror, has historical origins. What scares us cannot be understood to be universal. Castle of Otranto is unlikely to produce any type of fear in 2019 readers, unless it be a fear of reading a text written in such an antiquated fashion. Unless they are white men living under assumptions about the objectivity of science, readers of Frankenstein or At the Mountains of Madness are unlikely to understand precisely why the protagonists of these novels are so horrified at their inventions and discoveries, inventions and discoveries that each demonstrate the extent to which they are not the centers of their worlds or the masters of their destinies in the ways they previously believed. In short, the affects these horror stories produce only work for certain subjects at certain historical moments. Moreover, I would argue that these texts do not represent affects already present in the world that might be freely taken up or cast aside by subjects who choose their own paths through history. Rather, they identify new affects that subjects bound by their historical circumstances might consider adopting in order to better understand the precise ways in which they are bound. Yes, defining horror in terms of affect may blur the boundaries between genres conventionally understood to be distinct, but doing so allows us to understand the work that horror does at its moment of production. Annihilation may very well not work as horror for every subject reading it SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 31 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER today, but I would argue that the affect it produces—one that in some way acknowledges what we have been even as it insists that we need to be something else, a kind of hopeful terror—is necessary at this juncture in history. The discourse on modernity and historical consciousness tells us that the past and those who dwell there are fundamentally different than the present, that as the world changes we necessarily and productively lose what we were before. And yet modernity seems to always understand itself as some final step insofar as it involves itself with institutions and systems, such as democracy and capitalism, that can and will withstand any assault from the human world or the natural on—hence the term “postmodern” and all similar terms that can only understand the present in relation to this final step. The Anthropocene and the rise of contemporary nationalisms and populisms force us to recognize that modernity is at best an historical moment that too shall pass and at worst an aberration within a long history of barbarism when circumstances made it possible for the world to even contemplate equality for all of those who live within it. Of course, this contemplation was very often in bad faith and has spectacularly failed in nearly every respect, but that the very conversation even took place suggests a set of material conditions that had not existed before and will inevitably come to an end. While Annihilation does not tell us precisely what we must become in order to navigate the future, it insists, by way of an affect it produces appropriate to this moment, that we must become. Of his concept of revel, Clute writes, “As a noun it describes a formal event bound in time and place, an event in which the field of the world is reversed […]. As a verb, Revel refers to the actions which create and animate such an event, actions of telling which catch the revelation on the wing; it also points to the subversive nature of story itself: because, as it is being told, every story about the world threatens to transport us out of our previous understandings of the world” (Clute 117). Whether as an event or an action, revel involves the end of something and the beginning of something else. At this moment, or because of this action, the subject must take a side: remain what it was and suffer under a new regime in which it has no place or become what it is not yet and suffer for all it will have lost in the hope that it might prosper (or at least survive) under conditions it cannot know before it inhabits them. It cannot know these conditions because the far side of revel cannot be narrated, cannot be told, cannot be “storied”—not in terms comprehensible to those on this side of the divide and beholden to the forms of thought that produce and maintain that material condition. The Southern Reach Trilogy tries to offer such narration at times, by way of the psychologist’s thoughts as she dies, the biologist’s journal, and the lighthouse keeper’s 32 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER reveries. But none of these words can give to readers what these subjects experience. If we are honest, we must admit that we cannot understand what they go through even if we understand that they go through something. Rather, the trilogy, and especially Annihilation, seek to produce an affect, a peculiar kind of horror specific to this moment. If there is historicity to the novel it has nothing to do with what it shows us and everything to do with how it makes us feel, with an affect that may not be universal now but is nonetheless impossible under any other material condition. Works Cited Clute, John. The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror. Payseur & Schmidt, 2006. VanderMeer, Jeff. Annihilation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 33 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER Not Your Artist Friend: Turning the Tables on the Nonhuman Turn Isabel de Sena Independent Curator I remember clearly my first encounter with the idea of nonhuman art production. As an inadvertent first-year student of Art History, it caught me wholly unaware, and I can recall the sense of excitement, the thrill of seeing my field as a prospective art scholar be fundamentally questioned, its scope expanded beyond all expectation. The encounter came through an article by John Onians titled “Neuroarthistory: Making More Sense of Art,” in which the author proposes that understanding the neural apparatus of artmakers and viewers “adds a new set of insights into the unconscious mental formation of both” (283). Aiming to demonstrate the universal applicability of such an approach, Onians presents the following case: A captive infant bottlenose dolphin sees her trainer on the other side of the aquarium glass puffing smoke clouds from a cigarette. The dolphin swims to her mother, briefly suckles milk, and then returns to the trainer to release a cloud of milk into the water, exactly replicating the trainer’s exhalation of smoke into the air. (271-272) Onians explains that, even without inducement, the dolphin’s mirror neurons are geared to help her learn complex behaviour by mimicking others, which she is rewarded for by the release in the brain of chemicals such as dopamine. That she does this by ingeniously using a different medium and support than those in the original is presented as a reason for claiming that the dolphin created an artwork. The discussion on nonhuman art production continued with other examples, including for instance the awe-inspiring durational performances of Australian Bowerbirds, Onians's dolphin and trainer. 34 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER which as observed by David Attenborough in the series BBC Earth work tirelessly for months on end to build spectacular nests with beckoning gardens that serve to lure females for mating. Especially the use of blue—the least commonly occurring colour in their habitats (though decreasingly so given the prevalence of plastics)—works wonders to persuade the females, providing them with proof of the male’s foraging capacities and meticulous attention to detail. Here, it’s the species’ aesthetic sensibility—on the level of both creation and judgment—that has led many to argue that their work is artistic. While most of my co-students, expecting to just be normal and study regular art history, were not amused about having to learn about something so weird as nonhuman artmaking, a handful of us were enthralled, if not a bit sceptical, that the basic premises underlying our understanding of art were being brought into question. Since then, the “nonhuman turn”1 and the short-lived spectacle of Object-Oriented Ontology (aka OOO)— the art/philosophical theory that through its blog-based existence and its sanctioning of wild speculation about the sentience of non-living matter so effectively exploited “the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students” —have nurtured a sustained interest in the idea of nonhuman art (Ray Brassier, qtd. in Erdem). I could not have foreseen just how heavily the notion of nonhuman art would come to permeate the artistic landscape of today, and my unease with it has grown proportionately. There’s something utterly perverse and anthropocentrically arrogant about describing the appearance, behaviour and traces of nonhuman beings/entities/phenomena as art. And if I see one more water basin in a gallery “miraculously” exhibiting the motion of otherwise invisible sound waves, I think I’m going to scream. Or the appropriation of behavioural patterns in slime mould for audience-participation performances (see, for example, the work of Heather Barnett), or mushroom spores tattooed with geometrical patterns that SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 35 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER then—lo and behold the startling agency of nature—grow to form non-geometrical shapes. In its portrayal of Area X as a place teeming and pulsating with life, and of the expeditioners’ idle struggle to cognitively and/or affectively access or even register the phenomena they encounter, Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy fully captures the utter inadequacy of the current trend of describing nonhuman agency as artistic. It also shows why taking distance from it is no small matter, striking at the heart of our incapacity to begin to respond in any consequential way to the enormity of the impending ecological catastrophe (as some call it, adopting a human perspective if we consider the collapse will be primarily human); In short, a failure to develop an ecological consciousness, as I hope to explain in what follows. Matter, both in the weird ecology of Area X and the planet we inhabit, be it sentient or not, is intensively expressive, which of course is very different to saying it’s artistic. A crystal expresses its qualities because its molecular properties are manifest in its form, much like a hurricane or other extreme weather event expresses the conditions that birthed it – in its volume, path, moisture level, temperature, and every other behavioural factor detailing the source code of the highly complex environmental circumstances that caused its emergence, incremental growth and death. We are able to read and interpret some of these observable data and consequently to appreciate them, scientifically, affectively, aesthetically. But in their vast complexity, these are hyperobjects that to a large extent lie beyond our comprehensive or even perceptual capacities. A first reductive step is then the gross underestimation of the expressive qualities of matter, which in Area X appear magnified to the point of terror: “a kind of ongoing horror show of such beauty and biodiversity that one could not fully take it all in.” (VanderMeer 45). A second and far more disheartening step is the feeble human attempt at imposing order on nonhuman agents by designating them as producers of art, which as a human construct is equivalent to claiming we can bring them within reach, thereby heavily underplaying how deeply depleted we really are of any potential for understanding… There is not hardly enough deferential regard in this projective gesture for the terrific forces at play in our environment; not hardly enough consideration for the extreme extent to which we cannot possibly colonize and own it with the narrow gaze of our nomenclatures. This projective and proprietary gesture is not only entirely absent in Area X, it’s effectively capsized to enact the inverse: nonhuman agency infiltrates into and irrupts within human subjects, disquieting and unsettling them by compromising their very sense of 36 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER being (human), literally blowing their minds, “like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear” (VanderMeer 194). (This phrase appears repeatedly throughout the trilogy and forms part of a larger passage written in living matter on the walls of the “topographical anomaly,” composed by the alien organism inhabiting its depths.). Vandermeer in fact explicit addresses the tendency to conceive of nonhuman agency as artistic in a passage in which the main character contemplates thinking of “a brightness [as] a kind of symphony,” then reels in, lamenting about “Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of imagination, because people couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an own or a whale or a bumblebee” (733). Even the most pointed attempts at bringing phenomena within the scope of readability—let alone comprehension— are compromised by a misrecognition of the very terms of intelligibility, “I leaned in closer, like a fool … someone tricked into thinking that words should be read” (VanderMeer 27). Art, however ambiguous and polysemic within our own frame of reference, remains but a scant recourse in negotiating that un-intelligibility. An environmental consciousness that takes the force of nonhuman agency today seriously demands a far greater leap: one that desists from relentlessly reaching outward in evermore inventive ways, and that takes distance from the tireless reliance on the idea that surely a greater effort will bear fruit, the conviction that if we just try a little harder we can succeed in understanding anything. Rather, it urges the inverse: a retractive movement that acknowledges a definite failure of comprehension, yielding to the reality that “Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken,” that our invasive propensity is exhausted, and that now it’s human life that’s being “invaded, infected, remade” (VanderMeer 194, 624). Not without fear, an ecological consciousness that is of any consequence today must take seriously the possibility not only that nonhuman agency exists in forms that cannot be subsumed into our conceptual apparatus, but that it can occur “through processes so invisible to human beings that the sudden visibility of it would be an irreparable shock to the system” (VanderMeer 761). In this light, the extraordinary pettiness of describing the dolphin’s deviceful playfullearning behaviour or bowerbirds’ marvellous constructions as artistic, let alone the tragic pretension of thinking we could possibly hope to act anywhere near as collaboratively as superorganisms like slime mould, are beyond ridiculous. It’s disconcerting and alarming that even those of us with the best intentions cannot forgo positioning ourselves at the centre of it all by recurring to self-congratulatory, allegedly non-anthropocentric gestures that are ultimately nothing other than projections of our own inventions onto nonhumans, SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 37 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER including our most elevated notion: art. Continuing on this path, we will forever be confined to creating more flat and sterile substantiations of what we consider to be an ecological consciousness, too bound to our preformed categories, too filtered by the reductive sieve of our senses and brains—much like Lowry’s replica of Area X and its stale movie-set feel: “inert and pathetic” (VanderMeer, 659). Within my encounters over roughly the past decade with the development of nonhuman artistic production as a trending topic in the practice and discourse of contemporary art, I feel the moods and attitudes of the Southern Reach Trilogy mark an important turning point. I hope its legacy will be as infectious and virulent as Area X itself, and that its spores can disperse and replicate to become at least as influential in the field of art as the preceding tendencies I have described. This is not to suggest such a development will resolve anything; only that it will induce a reboot that might provoke a much-needed shift in artistic approaches to nonhuman agency: one that can attend with greater vigour to the fact that “If [we] don't have real answers, it is because we still don't know what questions to ask” (VanderMeer 194). Film still portraying the border around Area X. Annihilation, dir. Alex Garland, 2018. Diacritically opposed to Onians’ dolphin—the integrity of its existence doubly invaded, first by its lifelong captivity in the name of human entertainment and second in the human attempt to explicate its behaviour on distinctly human terms—stands the 38 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER dolphin encountered by the biologist in the “pristine wilderness” of Area X. “Rolling slightly to the side,” it stares at her “with an eye that did not, in that brief flash, resemble a dolphin eye . . . It was painfully human” (VanderMeer 99). This is not a human eye inserted into the animal, as we slowly learn, but a once-human, now engulfed, infected, and remade by the aquatic mammal’s genetic code gone haywire, forever fated to exist as a remnant trace within the dolphin’s overpowering being. Notes 1. The 2012 conference The Nonhuman Turn, hosted by the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, marks the first historical claim to this development, followed by the publication in 2015 of Richard Grusin’s volume of collected essays. Works Cited Erdem, Cengiz. “Ray Brassier Interviewed by Marcin Rychter: ‘I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth.’” Senselogic, 5 Mar. 2011, https://cengizerdem.wordpress. com/2011/03/05/ray-brassier-interviewed-by-marcin-rychte-r-i-am-a-nihilist-becausei-still-believe-in-truth/. Grusin, Richard, editor. The Nonhuman Turn. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Onians, John. “Neuroarthistory: Making More Sense of Art.” World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, edited by Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme, pp. 265286, Valiz, 2008. VanderMeer, Jeff. Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy. 4th Estate, 2018. SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 39 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER “This End of Everything”: The Southern Reach Trilogy and the Already Ended World W. Andrew Shephard University of Utah IN the five years since its publication, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) has gone on to become a seminal text in the Weird fiction renaissance of the twenty-first century, a both a nationwide bestseller and as the source material for a critically acclaimed film. Part of this popularity is self-evident; the trilogy is arguably VanderMeer working at the height of his literary gifts. But the trilogy’s acceptance by a mainstream audience outside of genre circles can also be interpreted as part of a general sea change culturally speaking. In recent years, we have experienced a rapid increase in events and calamities which might have previously seemed “unthinkable”—from 9/11 to the increasing urgency of climate change. This, in turn, has necessitated the development of newer conceptual frameworks for thinking through them. For instance, Amitav Ghosh has suggested that the realist novel may simply not be up to the task of addressing phenomena on the scale of global warming. As he puts it: “to risk banishment to the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house [of “literary” fiction]—those generic outhouses that… have now come to be called ‘fantasy’, ‘horror’, and ‘science fiction’” (Ghosh 24). As Benjamin Robertson has argued in his monograph on VanderMeer’s fiction, as a signifier Area X refuses to be reducible to any one referent. This irreducibility is one of the novels’ most compelling conceits—the fact that Area X actively resists the understanding of not only the characters but also the reader him or herself. However, if Area X resists semiotic ties to any particular referent, it does call to mind a particular type of phenomenon—namely, Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject.1 As Morton defines the term: “hyperobjects are things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (Morton 1). VanderMeer himself has acknowledged the linkage. In the essay, “Haunting the Anthropocene” (2016), he remarks that Morton’s concept “has become central to thinking about storytelling in the modern era… The word therefore is a very important signifier for any fiction writer wishing to engage with the fragmented and diffuse issues related to the Anthropocene” (“Haunting”). Perhaps this is where the New Weird of authors such as VanderMeer, China Mieville, and Steph Swainston most clearly departs from the older (haute) Weird tradition. The Haute 40 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER Weird often conceptualizes this as rupture or intrusion, even if the threat itself is ancient, the horror lies in our sudden realization of its existence. By contrast, the strange phenomena of the New Weird frequently has an air of the familiar. For example, the various non-human creatures of Mieville’s New Crobuzon are not conceived as foreign invaders, but fellow citizens in their own right—complete with their own customs, traditions, languages, and social mores. They are not strangers to teeming metropolis of the stories’ setting, they’ve been there all along. Similarly, at the start of Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, the phenomena which creates Area X has been in place for thirty years—enough time for two generations to grow to adulthood. People have more or less gotten used to its presence, even if they are not entirely aware of its exact nature. Perhaps one of the most unsettling things about the series is its acknowledgement of how easily we adjust to even the direst of circumstances if it happens incrementally. As Morton notes: “The end of the world has already occurred” marked by a “logarithmic increase in the actions of humans as a geophysical force.” Moreover, “the end of the world is associated with the Anthropocene, its global warming and subsequent drastic climate change, whose precise scope remains uncertain while its reality is verified beyond question. […] There has been a decrease in appropriate levels of concern” (Morton 7). Area X, with its slowly but steadily expanding border, effectively conveys the existential threat of climate change in a way that feels tangible for the reader. We may not be able to truly perceive the totality of our gradual destruction of the environment, as well as the dire consequences it may ultimately hold in store for us, but we can viscerally comprehend the idea of nature pushing back to essentially erase us from existence. Likewise, the imagery of a desolate and abandoned landscape, filled with eerie reminders of the people who inhabited the region before the border appeared, is also simultaneously suggestive of the fact that the Anthropocene, like all eras, will eventually come to an end. If Annihilation finds the mundanity hidden within the weird, then Authority highlights the inherent weirdness hidden within the mundane. Like Annihilation, Authority deploys certain alienation effects to estrange us from its characters—focalizing the narrative through the perspective of government bureaucrat John Rodriguez, who self-identifies as Control, who has been tasked with taking over the Southern Reach in the wake of the previous director’s failure to return from Area X. Control’s self-selected moniker not only serves as our first indication of the hypnosis he has been subjected to at the agency’s Central offices, it also reduces him to an abstraction in a manner not unlike the women of the twelfth SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 41 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER expedition. In the same way, the biologist and her team were essentially reduced to their specialties within the group, so Control is essentialized to his defining characteristic—his desperate need to believe that he is in control of his surroundings and those with whom he interacts. This need manifests in a tendency towards constant mind games and a generalized paranoia about the intentions of others, particularly his acting director. For instance, after a previous encounter in which Grace evinced a inclination towards insubordinate behavior, Control reasserts his dominance by paying an unexpected visit to her office to throw her off balance. We are treated to the following explanation of his actions: “Control had wanted to impose himself on Grace’s territory, to show her that he was comfortable there” (235), an amusingly petty power play which Siobhan Carroll associates with “the history of imperialism” (Carroll 79). Control plays similar psychological games with other members of the Southern Reach staff, essentially taking on the role of a micromanaging Machiavelli. There is a certain irony then, in the fact that a character who is so named and so inclined in disposition, is essentially bereft of agency for the major of the second novel. Not only is Control being remotely manipulated via hypnosis by his superiors at Central but he is undermined at every turn by Grace, his assistant director and immediate subordinate. The tale of how Control acquired his nickname is also insightful. It is bestowed upon him by his grandfather, Jack Severance, a legend in the intelligence community, whose own name suggests a backhanded reference to Ian Fleming’s James Bond. “When he was eight or nine, they’d gone up to the summer cottage by the lake for the first time—‘our own private spy club’, his mother had called it. Just him, his mother, and Grandpa. There was an old TV in the corner, opposite the tattered couch. Grandpa would make him move the antenna to get better reception. ‘Just a little to the left, Control,’ he’d say. […] And so he’d gotten his nickname, not knowing his grandfather had stolen it from spy jargon. […] When he grew up, he took ‘Control’ for his own. He could still feel the sting of condescension in the word by then, but would never ask Grandpa if he’d meant it that way, or some other way” (139). This nickname, informed by both his desire for his grandfather’s approval and deep-seated insecurity, is both a burden and the shield by which he protects himself from the world. Moreover, when Control attempts to enact the type of spy movie fantasies suggested by his pedigree, by charming a young woman on an early undercover assignment, it backfires horribly—ending with said woman killed by her militia affiliated boyfriend and Control himself permanently sidelined from fieldwork. More than just a subtle jab at the Bond franchise, there is a critique of certain callous ways of performing masculinity that are native to such fantasies as well as the fact that Control has been more or less groomed for 42 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER such behavior since childhood. In light of the interrogation of masculinity that has gone on in recent years, this theme seems surprisingly prescient. Control’s handler and immediate superior at Central, James Lowry, sole survivor of the legendarily disastrous first expedition into Area X can be read as a similar deconstruction of a familiar male archetype. We first encounter him as an abstraction as well; namely, as the mysterious “Voice” on the phone who periodically calls to reinforce Control’s conditioning and pump him for information on the Southern Reach. Control somewhat humorously conceives of him as “a megalodon or other leviathan, situated in a think tank filled with salt water in some black-op basement so secret and labyrinthine that no one now remembered its purpose even as they continued to reenact its rituals” (165). The image has an absurdity to it, but it also carries a sense of a primordial menace to it. Strikingly, it uses the iconography of the traditional Weird tale (the leviathan lurking within the depths, being sustained and appeased by arcane rituals as it awaits its turn to emerge and menace civilization) and swerves by associating it with a government bureaucrat. There is the suggestion that the monster at the end of this book is not located in the Outside, as posited by many writers of the haute Weird but within the social superstructures we ourselves have constructed in order to protect ourselves. We finally meet the man behind the megalodon in Acceptance, when Gloria (Control’s predecessor as director of the Southern Reach) is summoned to Lowry’s office at Central for a debrief following her unauthorized expedition beyond the border. She describes him thus: “The mane of golden hair now silver, grown long. The determined, solid head on a thick neck, the landmark features upon a face that had served him well: craggy good looks, people say, like an astronaut or an old-fashioned movie star” (441). This description and his own status as an early explorer of Area X aligns Lowry with an archetype of rugged masculinity particularly celebrated in the early and mid-twentieth century and practically hagiographized by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff. Yet this is revealed to be merely a veneer disguising the rot that is the true Lowry. Petty, vain, both obsessed with and abusive of the institution power he possesses, Lowry runs Central as his own private fealty—a status quo he maintains through intimidation and the unethical deployment of hypnosis. More than just a government functionary, Lowry has a particular investment in the Southern Reach’s expeditions into Area X. As Gloria informs us: Lowry has had a replica of Area X’s lighthouse built and a replica of the expedition base camp, and even a hole in the ground meant to approximate the little known about the ‘topographical anomaly’ […] But, in truth, standing there with Lowry, SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 43 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER looking out across his domain through a long plate of tinted glass, you feel more as if you’re staring at a movie set: a collection of objects that without the animation of Lowry’s paranoia and fear, his projection of a story upon them, are inert and pathetic. No, not even a movie set, you realize. More like a seaside carnival in the winter, in the off-season, when even the beach is a poem about loneliness (440). In a sense, Lowry’s model of Area X in microcosm reflects a pathological need to control or master his surroundings, to exert his will upon the place which scarred him emotionally. And for all the atrocities and abuses which happen on his watch, it is also rendered as something pitiable. This is not to say that either VanderMeer or Gloria let him off the hook for his actions. As Gloria opines: Is Lowry a monster? He is monstrous in your eyes, because you know that by the time his hold on Central, the parts of Central he wants to make laugh and dance the way he wants them to laugh and dance… by the time this hold, the doubling and mirroring, has waned as most reigns of terror do, the signs of his hand, his will, will have irrevocably fallen across so many places. His ghost will haunt so much for years to come, imprint upon so many minds, that if the details about the man known as Lowry are suddenly purged from all the systems, those systems will still reconstruct his image from the very force and power of his impact (564). Lowry’s influence, the institutional power he wields, becomes another insidious hyperobject—too spread out across time and space to be effectively perceived by the people it will inevitably harm.2 It is not entirely unlike the Gulf Oil Spill, which VanderMeer credits with inspiring his writing of the trilogy.3 Such a vision seems unfortunately quite timely for the contemporary reader living in the wake of Donald Trump’s disastrous tenure as president, despite the election being just two years away at the time of the novel’s publication. Late in the third book, during her last meeting with Lowry at Central before setting off on the expedition which would claim her life, Gloria remarks that she feels as though she is “watching a war between Central and Area X”. Moreover, “[i]n some fundamental way, you feel, they have been in conflict for far longer than thirty years—for ages and ages, centuries in secret. Central the ultimate void to counteract Area X: impersonal, antiseptic, labyrinthine, and unknowable” (516). The musing has a certain underlying logic to it. After all, “‘man’ vs nature” has been identified as one of the five essential plots in narrative storytelling. If we take such narratives as emblematic of humankind’s longstanding need to bring order to perceived chaos by exerting mastery over nature and bending it to our 44 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 collective will, then the conflict between Central and Area X is just the latest beachhead in a conflict which has gone on for millennia. Riffing on this thought, one can make the case for the trilogy as a whole as having a somewhat Hegelian structure, with the aggressive “abdifference”4 of Area X’s nature as thesis in the first book, and the sterile artifice of Southern Reach’s bureaucracy as its antithesis in the second. Acceptance, then, becomes synthesis which reconciles the two after a fashion. In her analysis of the novels, Alison Sperling argues that “the trilogy is… not a simple morality tale; though terrifying, it does not condemn humanity but instead demands a complete overhaul of its terms” (Sperling 250). Sperling connects the bodily transformations undergone by visitors to Area X to Stacy Alaimo’s notion of “trans-corporeality,” a theoretical state of “interconnectedness, interchanges, and transits between the human and the morethan-human world” (qtd in Sperling 245). We perhaps see this best reflected in the fates of the protagonists from the previous two novels. For Control, whose entire arc as a character has been to struggle with his fundamental non-agency in the face of larger than life forces, he finally hits a wall during his travels through Area X. Breaking down at the revelation that he and his party members may no longer be on Earth anymore, he laments “this fucking ugly place, this place that isn’t really even where its supposed to be, this fucking place that just keeps killing people and doesn’t fucking even give you the chance to fight back because it’s going to win anyway…” (Area X 491). For Control, confronting the limitations of his own agency, the impossibility of “winning” is a profoundly shattering experience. His story concludes with him accompanying Ghost Bird, the imperfect doppelganger/clone of the biologist, into the tower for one final confrontation with the being known as the Crawler. In the confrontation, he undergoes a transformation in which he becomes something other than human. In our last moments with him, we are told that: “Now ‘Control’ fell away again. […] He sniffed the air, felt under his paws the burning heat, the intensity. This was all that was left to him, and he would not now die on the steps; he would not now suffer that final defeat. John Rodriguez elongated down the final stairs, jumped into the light” (573). Yet, unlike the pitiful moaning creature whose cries disturbed the biologist expedition, there is a sense of exultation in John’s becoming. At long last, he is free to relinquish the Control persona which has been his armor since childhood. There is the subtle implication here, in the description of his having “elongated down the final stairs” of the long time cat owner as having possibly taken on a feline form—a fitting fate, for as anyone who has spent time with them know, they are a species who answer to no one. For the biologist, it involves a transformation that far more alarming and grotesque, SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 45 at least on the surface. And yet we are told upon her arrival: Nothing monstrous existed here—only beauty, only the glory of good design, of intricate planning, from the lungs that allowed this creature to live on land or at sea, to the huge gill slits hinted at along the sides, shut tightly now, but which would open to breathe deeply of seawater when the biologist once again headed for the ocean. All of those eyes, all of those temporary tidal pools, the pockmarks and the ridges, the thick, sturdy quality of the skin. An animal, an organism that had never existed before or that might belong to an alien ecology. That could transition not just from land to water but from one remote place to another, with no need for a door or border. (494) While the transformation is admittedly disturbing to human aesthetic sensibilities, there would seem to be some advantages to the tradeoff. The biologist, “in all her glory and monstrosity”, has become a uniquely adaptable organism. For a woman who never truly felt alone amidst the anthropocentric artifice of cities, such a transformation could be considered a gift rather than a curse. In a sense, such transformations could be considered a type of bioforming, an attempt by Area X at reconstructing human beings into something better capable of existing in a kind of balance with nature than we have currently managed so far. So what are we to make of the ending to the trilogy, in which Grace and Ghost Bird, make their way back to the border site for Area X, desperately hoping that there is still a border to cross? It is interesting, and perhaps fitting, that VanderMeer leaves the reader on a note that is somewhat ambiguous but not entirely bereft of hope. It is not unlike Bong Joon-ho’s film Snowpiercer (2013), which similarly leaves the viewer in a state of uncertainty as to whether its surviving characters make it to the abandoned airplane fuselage, and by extension, escape the metaphor for late capitalism represented by the eponymous train. Likewise, the reader of the Southern Reach trilogy is left wondering if Ghost Bird’s intervention with the Crawler has come in time or whether the expansion of Area X’s borders has already consumed the rest of the world. A similar uncertainty hovers over the issue of global warming—whether our attempts to halt or slow its progress have been timely enough or are even adequate to the task. Notes 1. Critics such as David Tompkins and Kaisa Kortekallio have also made this linkage in 46 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 previous analyses of the Southern Reach trilogy. 2. Joshua Rothman has similarly discussed the Southern Reach’s bureaucracy as a hyperobject in his New Yorker article “The Weird Thoreau.” 3. VanderMeer mentions the Gulf Oil spill as a source of inspiration in the essay “Haunting in the Anthropocene.” 4. I refer here Benjamin Robertson’s coinage in his discussion of Area X’s “radical difference does not afford a collapse in which terms previously distinguished by abstract borders find one another and merge… an uncontainable space that is nothing but bordering without a border” (Robertson 116-17). Works Cited Carroll, Siobhan. “The Terror and Terroir: The Ecological Uncanny in New Weird Exploration Narratives.” Paradoxa, no. 28, 2016, pp. 67-87. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016. Kortekallio, Kaisa. “Contamination: Reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects.” Conference Paper, VIII Conference on Cultural Studies, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland, December 2015, https://www.academia. edu/20189679/Contamination_Reading_Jeff_VanderMeers_Annihilation_and_ Timothy_Mortons_Hyperobjects?email_work_card=thumbnail. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. U of Minnesota P, 2013. Robertson, Benjamin J. None of this is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. U of Minnesota P, 2018. Rothman, Joshua. “The Weird Thoreau.” The New Yorker, 14 January 2015, http://www. newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/weird-thoreau-jeff-vandermeer-southernreach. Sperling, Alison. “Second Skins: A Body-Ecology of Jeff VanderMeer's The Southern Reach Trilogy.” Paradoxa, no. 28, 2016, pp. 230-55. Tompkins, David. “Weird Ecology: On the Southern Reach Trilogy.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 30 September 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/weird-ecology-southern- SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 47 reach-trilogy/. VanderMeer, Jeff. Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2014. ---. “Hauntings in the Anthropocene: An Initial Exploration.” Environmental Critique, 17 July 2016, https://environmentalcritique.wordpress.com/2016/07/07/hauntingsin-the-anthropocene. 48 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER Area X, Tangible Bodies, and the Impossibility of Individuation Elif Sendur Binghamton University BY the time Jeff VanderMeer published the Southern Reach Trilogy in 2014, I already knew his work. His stand-alone piece from the Ambergris universe, Finch, is one of my favorite books, with its islands of fungal fruiting bodies and a feeling of noir that surrounded me while I read it. Finch is weird: it is a detective fiction taking place in a city inundated with fungi and ruled by humanoid-fungus Gray Caps spreading their spores everywhere and thereby transforming humans. The novel is fleshy, smelly, and oozy – alienating but attractive. While reading as an academic looking for tropes, abstractions, and conceptual tools - a professional habit that risks ruining the act of reading books or watching films - my concepts could not keep up with the language and the universe of the book. I noticed an exciting, non-Cartesian understanding of the body that was an amalgamation, a symbiosis, a thought that refused to be pinned down with the academic tools available to me then. Finch was published in 2009 and I was reading it in 2014; Haraway had not yet published Staying with the Trouble and Malatino’s Queer Embodiment was probably being written. The only thing I could do was to feel weird. VanderMeer’s book promised me a new thought, a liberating one, yet I did not have the tools to utter it yet. Now, when Annihilation came out in 2014, my joy was immense. My encounter with Finch had already opened me up to new ways of thinking about contamination, borders, and bodies, and I was ready for more. I read the book in six hours and by the time I finished it, I knew I immediately wanted to write about it. I was not alone. After its publication, the Southern Reach Trilogy composed of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance entered academia fast. It first made its appearance in academic conferences where papers unpacked the space that Area X offered, with its Crawler that writes the world in fruiting bodies, with its biologist and its monstrous double, with its permeable borders emanating all over the world, imagining an out-there that is already in-here, with its breathing nature that rules with its own rules. The trilogy touched both old lines of thought like border and animal studies as well as genre studies, and newly popular ones, like posthumanism and ecocriticism. Area X is rich in concepts and we, academics, were consuming it fast. We just could not decide—echoing Rancière—with which sauce we should be eating it. Major scholarship on trilogy invested in questions of posthumanism and SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 49 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER ecocriticism: In Area X that VanderMeer offers, the relationship of the subject acting on an outside object called nature is no longer tenable hence it asks for another way to think about such relationality which Brian Onishi explores via Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action. This ontological realm leads to ethical questions as well: Prendergast imagines non-human ethics while Kaisa Kortekallio explores non-human affects and feelings. Gry Ulstein’s posthumanist article on Anthropocene monsters in the Weird genre epitomizes the two salient areas that many scholars examine regarding Area X : Anthropocene and the New Weird. In fact, Collateral has recently published two clusters with four articles each on the Weird and the Anthropocene specifically dedicated to the Southern Reach Trilogy. Alison Sperling explores the relation between the Weird and the queer via corporeality. Five years later its initial publication, Area X is still very prominent with Benjamin Robertson’s book being named as the “first book” written on it, and more were expected to follow. At this moment, I want to suggest three concepts that are as of yet unexplored or underexplored regarding Area X and VanderMeer’s work more broadly. First, VanderMeer brings us back to the body, and this is very difficult to do as the last thing that Western canonized theory as taught in the instutionalized academia wants to do is to go back to the body. Western thought, and with it the man of reason, privileges mind over body, reason over putrefying and everchanging flesh, conceptual thoughts over desiring, voluptuous appetites. We can find the roots of this obliteration of the body in the Cartesian dichotomy of body/mind, yet Genevieve Lloyd reminds us that Cartesian res cogitanz is always already a cisgender male haunting the disembodied thoughts of reason with his a priori assumption of gender. We can see this in the ascetic principles of abstinence and control over the body in the Epicureans and Stoics, which Foucault highlights in the third volume of The History of Sexuality (59); here, the body becomes the source of self-knowledge’s lack. We can see this in the political theories of the 1970s, where identity politics become important as long as we do not talk about the tangibility of the skin, the flesh, the ooze of those bodies involved in it. There are of course pockets of thought in critical theory where the body becomes a legitimate epistemic object: queer theory, feminist studies, disability studies, and some lines of postcolonial thought explore the body in meticulous, tangible and affective ways. Yet, these fields let us talk about bodies as long as their authority is marked, and their marginalization is accepted. Hence, to think of the body tout court is not common. VanderMeer forces us to think about the body not as a place of authority, not as a desiring machine, but as palpable materiality with concrete bifurcations. Take, for example, the biologist and their transformation: 50 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER The suggestion of a flat, broad head plunging directly into torso. The suggestion, far to the east, already overshooting the lighthouse, of a vast curve and curl of the mouth, and the flanks carved by dark ridges like a whale’s, and the dried seaweed, the kelp, that clung there, and the overwhelming ocean smell that came with it. The greenand-white stars of barnacles on its back in the hundreds of miniature craters, of tidal pools from time spent motionless in deep water, time lost inside that enormous brain. The scars of conflict with other monster’s pale and dull against the biologist’s skin. (VanderMeer, Acceptance 195) Now that the biologist has perfectly become one with Area X, they are no longer in a humanoid shape. Hence we may read this passage as an encounter with a monster , a liminal “living being of a negastive value”(28) as Canguilhem suggests, who is dwelling at the gates of difference as Cohen tell us, bringin us to the category of crisis (7). This way, even if we cannot name this biologist now, we can still understand that they are a monster and taxinmoze them as such. Yet here, the body is not a simple depiction to be categorized; it is the very site on which the transformations and the events take place. Hence a reading of monstrosity which would do away with what this body performs and which would immediately name this becoming biologist as such, is not enough to account for the body. Everywhere in the trilogy, we witness bodies becoming: Saul, the lighthouse keeper, becomes Area X through being touched by a splinter on his skin. The biologist inhales spores for her initiation. Here, the body can be read as a primary object of contamination, yet it is not objectified as such. It is not just a utility, an individual thing through which something else in the form of a self is being infected. Rather, the body is the individuating, ever-changing event that sets other events in motion. The body of the biologist is both a place and a space; it has an east with a “vast curve and curl of the mouth” (VanderMeer, Acceptance 195). Its gargantuan shape is made for us to touch with “flanks carved by dark ridges” and smells (VanderMeer, Acceptance 195). This tangibility, this texture, is not something simply to be observed by the characters in the novel or by the reader, as we are asked to come back to the body with something other than intelligence. This brings us to the second point: What are we going to use if we are not using our comprehension to interact with Area X? We can think about and around this question with one of the saddest characters in the novel, Whitby, who tries very hard to understand Area X via his reason. A perfect specimen of the scientific man, Whitby constantly attempts SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 51 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER to subsume Area X and everything with it under the rule of reason until he, just like Descartes, begins doubting his own senses, which culminates in his visit to Area X and his transformation into someone who does not make sense anymore. The following exchange takes place in one notable meeting: “I don’t think we’re looking at a plant,’ Whitby says, tentative, at one status meeting, risking his new relationship with the science division, which he has embraced as a kind of sanctuary. ‘Then why are we seeing a plant, Whitby?’” (VanderMeer, Acceptance 218) Whitby embodies the struggle of reason where he desperately tries to solve the riddle of Area X. Whitby encounters a monster: a plant-looking not-plant that defies an either/ or logic and the principle of the excluded middle, it is a blasphemy to try to use logic to open the secrets that Area X hides. Whitby’s gesture is that of classical individuation. He tries to taxonomize Area X as such and categorize it as a being. It does not really matter whether this being is a monster, an alien, or something else. For Whitby, it needs to be solved and named. Yet, he fails in this endeavor as Area X is not a being but a becoming, and it becomes with the people who interact with it. Here, we can see one of the most tangible ways to think about individuation as a process rather than an intact, undivided body. Whitby’s frustrations can be relieved if we turn to Gilbert Simondon, who proposes to think of an individual that is not the basis of experience but instead as a movement that does not result in any kind of final product. Simondon proposes a constant becoming where the individual is a phase of deployment. In his L’individu et sa genèse psycho-biologique, he asserts, “Individual is not a being but it is an act and being is individual as the agent of this act of individuation through which it manifests itself and exists…it is a transductive relation of an activity, the result and the agent at the same time, the consistency and the coherence of this activity through which it is being constituted and it constitutes” (my translation, Simondon 186). In other words, Whitby does not encounter a plant; he interacts with a phase of planting in which he becomes one of the transductive elements, one of the parts of this becoming. To try to account for this encounter in the language of being can only result in non-sense, as Whitby’s science colleague reminds him. Hence, a language based on static concepts of being will always fail us when we attempt to comprehend Area X. VanderMeer invites us to use other affects that are not limited to understanding. Which brings us to the third point that I would like to make about Area X: VanderMeer does not speak the narcissistic language of anthropocentrism, as Cixin Liu suggests in his defense of SF (22). With becoming constantly bringing us back to the body, Area X asks us to reconsider our language and its relation to our thinking. Indeed, the moment we leave 52 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER being a Whitby or VanderMeer-approved adjective “Smeagol of the Southern Reach,” then we are also risking making sense, as the object before us cannot be reduced to the mere language and is asking to be experienced rather than read and be done with (VanderMeer, ElectricLit). We have to reconsider how to talk about the body, the being, the individual, the relations. This is the lesson Control learns during his own transformation at the end of Acceptance: “nothing about language, about communication, could bridge the divide between human beings and Area X. That anything approaching a similarity would be some subset of Area X functioning at its most primitive level. A blade of grass. A blue heron. A velvet ant” (VanderMeer, Acceptance 311). Five years later, there are still many sauces with which to eat Jeff VanderMeer’s trilogy, as it remains fertile ground for critical posthuman studies, ecocritical thought, and genre and border studies. Area X can give us a tool to question our own assumptions regarding the project of sense-making, as well as tangible ways to think of transformation and becoming and thought of the body that is not limited to area studies. What is liberating and joyful for me is this very act of falling short of explication, where I am pushed to either think otherwise and with other people, like Simondon, or, when I cannot account for what I read, to be comfortable with the sensation of the weird that requires me accepting that understanding is just one of the affects among many.1 Notes 1. This is Ulus Baker’s statement as recorded by one his students. In response to his students’ complaint about not understanding a film that was being studied, rather than trying to explicate to help the student comprehend the film, Baker said “understanding is just one of the affects among many,” and moved forward with his lecture. Works Cited Area X—The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation, Authority & Acceptance , Jeff VanderMeer. Special issue of Collateral: Online Journal for Cross Cultural Close Reading, July 2019, http://www.collateral-journal.com/index.php?cluster=16. Area X—The Weird and the Anthropocene. Collateral: Online Journal for Cross Cultural Close Reading, July 2019, http://www.collateral-journal.com/index.php?cluster=15. Canguilhem, George. “Monsters and Monstrosity.” Trans. Terese Jager. Diogenes, vol. 10, no. 40, pp. 27–42. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1996. SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 53 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Volume 3: The Care of the Self. Vintage Books, 1986. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. Liu Cixin. “Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 22–32. Kortekallio, Kaisa. “Turning Away from the Edge of Madness: Kinesis, Nihilism, and Area X.” Special issue of Collateral: Online Journal for Cross Cultural Close Reading, July 2019, http://www.collateral-journal.com/index.php?cluster=16. Malatino, Hilary. Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience. U of Nebraska P, 2019. Onishi, Brian. “Terror and Terroir: Porous Bodies and Environmental Dangers.” Trespassing Journal: An Online Journal of Trespassing Art, Science, and Philosophy, vol. 6, Winter 2017, http://trespassingjournal.org/?page_id=1022 Prendergast, Finola Anne. “Revising Nonhuman Ethics in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 58, no. 3, 2017, pp. 333–60. Rancière, Jacques. Althusser’s Lesson. Continuum, 2011. Robertson, Benjamin J. None of This Is Normal: Rhe Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. U of Minnesota P, 2018. Simondon, Gilbert. L’individu et sa genèse psycho-biologique. Jérôme Milon, 1995. Sperling, Alison. “The Weird and The Queer.” Collateral: Online Journal for Cross Cultural Close Reading, July 2019, http://www.collateral-journal.com/index.php?cluster=16d. Ulstein, Gry. “Brave New Weird : Anthropocene Monsters in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, March 2017, pp. 71-96. VanderMeer, Jeff. Acceptance. Kindle Edition. Fourth Estate, 2015. ---. “Jeff VanderMeer Explains How to Wash a Mouse in the Southern Reach.” Electric Literature, 18 Nov. 2014, https://electricliterature.com/jeff-vandermeer-explains-howto-wash-a-mouse-in-the-southern-reach/. 54 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER Symposium Contributor Bios Alison Sperling received her Ph.D. in literature and cultural theory at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2017 and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. She writes about 20th and 21st century American literature including weird and science fiction, queer and feminist theory, and nonhumans in the Anthropocene, and is working on her first book manuscript, Weird Modernisms. Bethany Doane received her Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in August 2019. Her research focuses on contemporary literature and film, theories of gender and race, media studies, and critical theory. She is currently working on her first book project, Weird Reading: Race, Gender, and the Inhuman in Contemporary Horror, which emphasizes the political and methodological affordances of horror fiction in the weird tradition as it addresses critical concepts such as the inhuman, biopolitics, and the Anthropocene. Benjamin J. Robertson is assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder and author of None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. Isabel de Sena is a Berlin-based independent curator working at the intersection of feminist technoscience and art, and is urrently a Ph.D. candidate in Curatorial Practice at Reading University and Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Her current research explores the potential of science fictional narratives for “reprogramming the present” through the projects “M/others and Future Humans” (Multispecies Salon & Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology) and “WE WILL HAVE BEEN” (New Alphabet School, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin). Isabel has recently contributed as a curator to projects at FACT (Liverpool), diffrakt (Berlin), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin) and AxS Residency (L.A.), as an author to Technofeminist Practices in the 21st Century (Minor Compositions, 2019) and Jokebook (nGbK Verlag, 2015), and as a speaker to New Suns: A Feminist Literary Festival (Barbican Centre London, 2019), “OPEN SCORES: How to program the Commons” (panke.gallery Berlin, 2019), transmediale Berlin (2019) and “Producing Futures: Post-Cyber-Feminisms” (Migros Museum Zurich, 2019). Isabel is currently lecturer at NODE Center for Curatorial Studies (Berlin) and guest lecturer since 2016 at California Institute of the Arts. SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019 • 55 SYMPOSIUM: AREA X: FIVE YEARS LATER W. Andrew Shephard is an Assistant Professor of African American Literature in the University of Utah’s English department. His research focuses on modes of genre fiction such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror, as they intersect with questions of race, gender, and sexuality, and the ways in which marginalized peoples utilize the conventions of genre to address concerns specific to their communities. He is the author of the chapter “Afrofuturism of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” published in the Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), and the article “‘All is Always Now’: Slavery, Retrocausality, and Recidivistic Progress in Samuel R. Delany’s Empire Star (1966),” published in CR: The New Centennial Review. Elif Sendur received her Ph.D in English from Binghamton University in comparative literature in 2019 on the French cinema journal Cahiers du Cinema. Her research focuses on film history and theory, science fiction film and literature, body and queer studies, critical posthumanism, and disability studies, with secondary research that explores the placement and representation of monstrous, queer, and unruly bodies in literature, anime, and film, especially in the genre of science fiction and New Weird literature and media. She has recently published in a special issue of Studies in the Humanities on ecocriticism and disability studies. She has worked as a program coordinator and as healtheducator in Lesbian and Gay Family Building Project and she is dedicated to advocate for theequity and inclusion of marginalized communities. Sendur serves as H-Film editor and the Humanities and Social Sciences’s board council and participates in SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) e-waste committee. 56 • SFRA Review 330 • Fall 2019

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS

Log In

Area X Five Years Later

Area X Five Years Later

Related Papers

RELATED PAPERS

RELATED TOPICS