Annihilation:
SF, universalist discourses, and the posthuman era
Incredibly, a human face seemed to be rising out of the earth.
–Lena, in Annihilation
There is a debate about when Science Fiction (Sci-fi, or SF as a more or less
definable genre) began. Some would say in the work of Lucian, A True Story,
written in the 2nd century AD, or from Somnium, a novel
written in 1608 in Latin by Johannes Kepler. Adam Roberts (2018) argues that
the systematic sensibility of SF as a genre should be seen to have emerged
during the rise of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century
during which time the critique of religious authority has relaxed censorship
against progressive scientific thinking. The gap of over a millennium between
the Greek prototype and the Reformation re-emergence of SF is the function of
scientific inquiry shifting to protestant countries where “the sort of
speculation that could be perceived as contrary to biblical revelation could be
undertaken with more (although not total) freedom.”
The replacement of magical or supernatural by technological tropes is a core
feature of SF, even if, as Roberts observes, “some Catholic strand in science
fiction... is present in the vast majority of good SF, whether written by Catholic
authors or not.” Indeed, as a universalist discourse, Christianism, with its
coterie of angels and demons recodifiable into other tropes of extraterrestrial
or extra-human otherness, can even be said to provide an Ur-form not just for
SF but for many narrative genres like the Gothic or Horror as well. As Darko
Suvin (1979), a major historian and theoretician of the genre, expresses it:
Basically, SF is a developed
oxymoron, a realistic irreality, with humanized nonhumans, this-worldly Other
Worlds, and so forth. Which means that it is—potentially—the space of a potent estrangement,
validated by the pathos and prestige of the basic cognitive norms of our times.
Within the ambit
of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, the
first novel of his Southern
Reach Trilogy (Authority
and Acceptance
being the second and third) published in 2014 and adapted for film in 2018 with
Natalie Portman in the lead role, it can be argued that several modes of
universalisms intersect to push a supposedly not-really so Pop Culture hybrid subgenre
of SF called the “New Weird” into the New York Times Bestseller list and place
it on the stage of globally recognized novels.
Before the success of his trilogy, VanderMeer said in an interview that he had
“worked as an agent, as a publicist. I worked in a bookstore. I'd seen the book
culture from all the different points of view you can.” The difficulty in
breaking through the Young Adult SF and Fantasy fiction market defined by major
successes like Harry
Potter, The
Lord of the Rings, and Hunger Games or Twilight with a
tale without the usual triumphant ending or redemption at the end was immense.
His practical experience in and knowledge of the “communications circuit” in
Book history (Robert Darnton 1982) allowed him to navigate the legal and
commercial intricacies of the network of the American publishing industry. Darton writes:
To see the subject as a whole, it
might be useful to propose a general model for analyzing the way books come
into being and spread through society. To be sure, conditions have varied so
much from place to place and from time to time since the invention of movable
type, that it would be vain to expect the biography of every book to conform to
the same pattern. But printed books generally pass through roughly the same
life cycle. It could be described as a communications circuit that runs from
the author to the publisher (if the bookseller does not assume that role), the
printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader. The reader completes the
circuit, because he influences the author both before and after the act of
composition.
Although the historical development of SF as a genre traces itself back to
Europe (if we disregard the SF “ancient aliens” reading of Indian or other
ancient epics), the literary conditions there defined by the polarization
between high and Mass Culture in the early 20th century have
disfavoured SF’s rise as a major novelistic hybrid genre with serious literary
import. This is something that even Goethe had realized. In The Routledge Concise
History of World Literature, Theo D’Haen narrates: In an 1829
essay on a German translation of Thomas Carlyle's Life of Schiller, and
after having mentioned the inevitability of the coming of world literature,
Goethe writes that "what suits the masses will spread and will, as we can
already see now, give pleasure far and wide ... but what is really worth-while
will not be so popular."
As Adam Roberts has remarked, SF in a European country like France could be
seen to have reached its heydays with Jules Verne. In general, however, despite
the new glamour of SF plots which the Hollywood film industry cross-pollination
has conferred on them, SF novels have kept their quasi Mass Culture status and
appeal. This is a fact that could be seen to have worked strongly in its favor
in terms of dissemination or readership potential, especially in the United
States where SF has supposedly seen its Golden Age in the 30s to the 50s with
the emergence of canonical greats such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ray
Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, or Philip K. Dick, an age spurred on by the network
of a penny-friendly pulp fiction industry and SF popular review magazines. The
establishment of the Hugo Awards in 1953 and the Nebula in 1966 and many others
after is major step in the growth of the prestige of the SF genre.
Although the communications circuit is not a universalist discourse or trope in
itself, it does provide the material conditions for the universalization of a
genre, subgenre, or hybrid genre. This universalization can be seen as the
collective effect of the market forces of commercialization, the formation of
readership demographic, and the normalization of printed forms that such a
relationship must require as a horizon of exchange and expectation. It would be
interesting to see how the very notion of genre is the product of such a
circuit, producing a “cognitive norm” which can then be transgressed, not
without any commercial risk for both writer and publisher, as in the case of
VanderMeer’s Annihilation
where clear-cut triumphant ends have no typographical place. However, the role
of the circuit cannot be over-emphasized as was shown by Mariano Siskind (2012)
in the historic development of Magic Realism (both as an aesthetic idiom and as
a subgenre of the Novel) and the global success in the publication of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude.
If the communications circuit is the network in which authorial, lectorial,
commercial, legal, spatial, literary, and formal identities are forged and
reinforced, it is thus so only because the circuit is the channel upon which
the negotiation of cultural values and ideologies—in which society sees itself
reflected—is conducted. Hence, it is hardly surprising that the first major
specimens of World Literature are of mythic and religious nature, written
either in verse or prose: from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata,
Hesiod’s Theogony,
the Quran, to the Bible, for example. The birth of the notion of a Weltliteratur in
Weimar is perhaps a direct effect of a networked geography, something that was
emerging in a quicker pace in 19th century Europe than elsewhere,
undergoing the massive phases of the Industrial Revolution and enjoying the
high point of European Imperial and Colonial history through which Europe
became the metropolitan global center of the flow of goods, bodies, culture,
and wealth.
The universalizing discourse of religion is undoubtedly a major component of
the globalization of literature. Theo D’Haen (2012) cites Hutcheson Macaulay
Posnett for whom World Literature is necessarily informed by such religious
universalism:
World-literature to Posnett is
literature produced in cultures held together by what he calls “religious” or
“political” cosmopolitanism. Examples of the former are the Hebrew and Islamic cultures.
Examples of the latter are the Greek, or perhaps better Hellenic, and Roman, or
perhaps better Latin, cultures. “Between the world-religions of Israel and
Islam and the world-cultures of Alexandria and Rome there are, no doubt, very
wide differences,” he admits, “yet, though the former reach universality
through social bonds of creed and the latter reach universality through the
unsocial idea of personal culture, the outcome of both is to rise above old
restrictions of place and time, and to render possible a literature which,
whether based on Moses or Homer, may best be termed a 'world-literature'.” For
Posnett, then, the determining characteristic of such a world-literature is its
“severance of literature from defined social groups” or “the universalising of
literature.”
The capacity of religious metanarratives to provide the framework for works of
World Literature has made them logically indispensable in the constitution of
collective historical sense and memory, something which Frank Kermode has
underlined in his work on the poetics of fiction, The Sense of an
Ending (1967). The notion that the scientific progress of Modernity since
the Enlightenment has rendered religious metanarratives marginalized components
of the literary imagination in the 20th and 21st century
is arguably not quite accurate. The arrival of Science as a universalist
discourse of Modernity may be the second major component driving the destiny of
a novel or any literary work toward global status, but only because the gaps in
the positive knowledge of Science are complemented by the revisions of various
mythic idioms made available by a global print culture. God may no longer be
there before the Big Bang, or before the first single-celled organisms until
the emergence of Homo Sapiens, but Chance alone is not a satisfactory
explanation in a formally teleological Narrative that demands a structural
grammar of agents, actions, and recipients. The need for an Alpha and an Omega
contributes to the unsettling atmosphere of a tale whenever such
arch-structures are kept at bay or merely implied by the use of a hanging or
unsolved mystery.
Thus, despite being at odds with one another, religious and
scientific motifs can combine directly or indirectly to produce interesting
tales such as Asimov’s The Gods Themselves,
Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for
Leibowitz, or The
Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke. The supernatural may no
longer be around, or replaced by other beings, or simply left hanging as a
question, but the Absurd and the Enigma can only be perceived as the
counterpoint of a Universe imagined with meaning and purpose, even if they
remain unverifiable components for Science in general. However, the discourse
of Science does provide explanatory universalist logics of its own which tease
out the unknowns of a Universe full of mysteries, logics which provide other
metanarratives that ground the imaginaries of SF worlds.
Such a combination of universalist discourses may not be so obvious at first in
VanderMeer’s Annihilation,
riding as it does on the theory of panspermia
wherein life on Earth was seeded by microscopic life forms from meteorites, an
idea made more explicit in the 2018 film adaptation. Although it was kept a
mystery in the Trilogy, it could be inferred as an unformulated question
concerning the source of the incredible and complex biodiversity on the planet.
In the place of a mythic narrative of creation, Annihilation
deploys the tropes of evolutionary biology and accelerated genetic mutation
happening in the cordoned off region called Area X, an unexplained and growing
ecosystem on the Florida coast. Area X seems to be developing into a “pristine
wilderness” composed of yet unseen species resulting from a radical horizontal
gene transfer between and across all plant and animal species, and not just
among closely related kingdoms like bacterial organisms. There is also a hint
that inorganic or inanimate elements such as the walls of the “tower” may also
be endowed with some sort of living attributes.
To Lena, the biologist of the
12th expedition of four women, Area X is an expanding transitional
ecosystem which is transforming life’s organizational chart beyond recognition.
Faced with the “tower,” which was actually a circular mound on the ground with
a small opening that tunnelled underground (reminding us of Odysseus’s Hades
and Dante’s Inferno, a metaphor of the Earth as Womb, or the Unconscious), the
anthropologist remarked that it was made of “ambiguous” materials. For the
biologist who became immune to the psychologist’s hypnotic suggestions after
inhaling fungal spores, the walls were somehow alive. (Lena: “The tower was a living creature of
some sort. We were
descending into an organism.”) They were covered with colored fungi
spreading out and forming written words: “Where lies the
strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the
seeds of the dead to share with the worms that...” The religious tone is
unmistakable.
Lena’s own transformation began right after her spore contamination. She
described it as a kind of glow inside her growing and spreading slowly. It was
as if it marked the moment of her organic assimilation by Area X, echoing the
fungal writing on the tower or tunnel walls which she copied on her notebook: “There shall be a fire
that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark
flame shall acquire every part of you.” With it, she was gaining
extra-human abilities: “I had
brought a flashlight but found I could see well enough by the green glow that
emanated from my own body.” “The
bioluminescence of the words on the wall had intensified, and the glow from my
exposed skin seemed to respond in kind, lighting my way.” Her
transitional state allowed her to survive her encounter with the ubiquitous
moaning creature of Area X, described with almost human-like qualities: “A suggestion of the side of a
tortured, pale visage and a great, ponderous bulk behind it.” It had “an
almost plaintive keening, calling out to her, “pleading
with [her] to return, to see it entire, to acknowledge its existence.”
Going back to the base camp, her new abilities allowed her to survive a
gunfight with the military-trained surveyor:
“You’ve come back and you’re not human anymore. You should kill yourself so I
don’t have to.” I didn’t like her casual tone.
“I’m as human as you,” I replied. “This is a natural thing,” and realized she
wouldn’t understand that I was referring to the brightness. I wanted to say
that I was a natural thing, too, but I didn’t know the truth of that—and none
of this was helping plead my case anyway.
“Tell me your name!” she screamed. “Tell me your name! Tell me your goddamn
fucking name!”
“That won’t make any difference,” I shouted back. “How would that make any
difference? I don’t understand why that makes a difference.”
Silence was my answer. She would speak no more. I was a demon, a devil, something
she couldn’t understand or had chosen not to. I could feel her coming ever
closer, crouching for cover.
But no one really dies in Area X. It seems that the alien ecosystem absorbs
everything, recycles everything, and even human consciousness itself seems to
get “redistributed” into other forms or bodies, as if it were a field of
metamorphoses worthy of Ovid, a new mode of Eternal Life. The fungal writing on
the wall apparently confirms this: “That which dies shall
still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated
shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing...” Area X is capable of
re-transcribing genetic material in endless ways, as if it were preparing for
its final project: cloning human beings, but in a redesigned structure carrying
all the signatures of the ecosystem of Area X. Later expeditions indeed had
members returning back home with half of their memories gone, mere
doppelgangers of their former selves. All of them, however, die of cancer and
organ failure later on, failed prototypes of the genetic lab which was Area X.
In the 2018 film adaptation, this transition is made explicit, beginning with
the sudden return of Lena’s husband, who was a part of the 11th
expedition to Area X. At the end of the film, the couple met again in the
secured facility where they were held by a secret government agency of the
Southern Reach. Their eyes glowed with the “shimmer” of Area X, getting
re-acquainted as if for the first time, searching for the fragmented memories
of their former selves. The Edenic motif is difficult to ignore, as we realize
a new Adam and Eve had been reborn on Earth. This meeting marks the beginnings
of Homo sapiens 2.0.
Within the fictional universe of Area X’s mutagenic ecosystem, Michel
Foucault’s intimation of the limits of the age of “Man” had become a reality:
As the archaeology of our
thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps
nearing its end…..If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if
some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility
– without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to
cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of
the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased,
like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
Even if in the
Trilogy there was no surviving replica of Lena’s husband, the concept is clear:
Area X is building a new species after Homo sapiens. Its previous prototypes
didn’t survive, but later on, many will, including Lena’s “Ghost Bird”
(appearing in Acceptance).
The dissolution of Homo sapiens 1.0 is dramatized as a lost of self-identity by
Lena’s husband, whose journal she reads:
I am
walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long
time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me.
I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am
not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time...
In the Trilogy, the universalist discourses of religion and biological science
are tied up with the universalizing notion of Humanity as a species, whether
under God or under Darwin, or whether under the liberalist or secular form it
took after the Renaissance. In Area X, there are no more individual identities
as there are no more humanity as we know it today, a humanity steady in its
anthropocentric view of the world and history. In a strange revision of the
Edenic myth, it is a newly minted humanity or a “Posthumanity” which no longer
had dominion over everything, a Posthumanity closer to non-Western ideas of
animism.
Despite its darker themes of human dissolution before an unknown force of
Nature, VanderMeer’s Trilogy reaffirms the import of these universalizing
discourses in the production of literary works which address the global
thematic scale of a World Literature grounded on the intersection of concerns
beyond race, creed, or nationality. If today such a work of fiction, SF or not,
also integrates the current Ecological Emergency as another universalist
discourse to bolster its status as a global literary consciousness, it does so
in a critical manner such that it redefines the universal itself as that which
exceeds Humanity in all its discursive forms. The next evolutionary stage of
World Literature will appear only to abdicate its anthropocentric moorings to
reaffirm the “World” in it as the only legitimate binding universal located at
the end of an all-too-human identity or at the cusp of the radically Other.
Works Cited:
D’Haen, Theo. The Routledge
Concise History of World Literature. London & NY: Routledge, 2012.
Darnton, Robert. “What is the history of books?” in Daedalus 111(3):
65-83, 1982. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024803. Accessed May 12, 2018.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things:
An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London & NY: Routledge, 1989.
Mariano Siskind. “The Genres of World Literature: The
Case of Magic Realism.” In D’Haen Theo, David Damrosch, & Djelal Kadir,
eds. The Routledge
Companion to World Literature. London & NY: Routledge, 2012.
Roberts, Adam. The History of
Science Fiction, 2nd edition. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of
Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a LiteraryGenre. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1979.
VanderMeer, Jeff. Annihilation: A Novel
(The Southern Reach Trilogy). NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
