Reviewers and fans of the Southern Reach Trilogy have speculated that Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972), which Andrei Tarkovsky adapted in the movie Stalker (1979), are also among the prime influences or precursors for Annihilation and Area X. Argubaly, this retroactively places the Strugatskys and Tarkovsky in a Weird lineage. For example, see →.
Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). While more of an explanation of Area X, including its inception and its governance, gets laid out in the second and third books of the trilogy, in this essay I stick to the scope of Annihilation. The book’s success bridged VanderMeer’s work into mainstream fiction, and it was recently made into a movie by director Alex Garland.
Nick Statt, “How Annihilation changed Jeff VanderMeer’s weird novel into a new life form,” The Verge, February 28, 2018 →.
See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2009).
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Modern Library, 1902), 414–15.
James writes that “personal religious experience has its root and centre in mystical states of consciousness,” yet mysticism is not religion. James, Varieties, 413.
James, Varieties, 418.
Bernard McGinn writes that in Christianity, “the core of mysticism” is “inner transformation.” This entails a “knowledge of God gained not by human rational effort but by the soul’s direct reception of a divine gift.” McGinn, Introduction to The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism (Modern Library, 2006).
R. M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: a study in the evolution of the human mind (Philadelphia: 1901), as quoted in James, Varieties, 435. Emphasis mine.
VanderMeer, 178
Ibid, 7
Ibid, 25
Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Edmund Colledge, J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).
Anne Carson, Decreation (Knopf, 2005), 172.
Amy Hollywood, Introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20.
Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology and the Celestial Hierarchies, in McGinn (ed.), Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 286.
Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Paulist Press, 1981). McGinn describes apophasis as “negative speaking in which all statements must be unsaid in deference to God’s hidden reality.” McGinn (ed.), Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 281.
Eugene Thacker, lecture, New School for Social Research, January 30, 2018.
Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 285.
VanderMeer, 37
Ibid, 41
Ibid, 65
Ibid, 89
Ibid, 133
Ibid, 28 The narrator in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris repeatedly describes a similar hope in the face of the alien other; it was easier to imagine he was going insane than that there was something occurring on the planet Solaris beyond his comprehension: “The thought that I had lost my mind calmed me down.” Lem, Solaris, trans. Bill Johnston (Pro Auctore Wojciech Zemek, 2011 (1961)), 49.
VanderMeer, 28
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing, 1998. As quoted in McGinn (ed.), Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 242. An anchoress is a female anchorite, a hermit living in relative isolation.
Julian of Norwich in The Showings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Denise M. Baker (Norton, 2005), 126.
As described in Amy Hollywood, Acute Melancholia: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (Columbia University Press, 2016), 172–74.
Eugene Thacker: “In the broadest sense, mysticism concerns the communication with or mediation of the divine; yet, with its emphasis on divine unity, mysticism also tends towards the breakdown of communication and the impossibility of mediation. Mysticism is also indelibly material, though it is often a materiality without object, in that the body of the mystical subject becomes the medium through which a range of affects—from stigmata to burning hearts—eventually consumes the body itself. Finally, while mystical texts do display a proliferation of bodies, affects and words—in effect ‘distributing’ the subject—in many texts there remains a dark, vacuous core that is not simply a node on the network or a topological enclosure.” Thacker, “Wayless Abyss: Mysticism, mediation and divine nothingness,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 3, no. 1 (2012): 81.
Hollywood, Cambridge Companion, 25.
Hollywood, “Reading as Self-Annihilation,” in Acute Melancholia, 129.
Hollywood, Acute Melancholia, 182.
VanderMeer, 55
Ibid, 55
Ibid, 82
Ibid, 82
Hollywood, Cambridge Companion, 29.
Nancy Hartsock, “The feminist standpoint: Developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism,” in Feminism and Methodology, ed. Sandra Harding (Indiana University Press, 1987), 167.
Hartsock, “Feminist standpoint,” 168.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption (Zone, 1992), 241.
Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 254, 257. Bynum concludes that theologians in the Middle Ages were so certain that the material body was entirely necessary for personhood that the subsequent questions about corruptibility were much more important to them.
Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 255.
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Penguin, 1960), 68.
Laing, Divided Self, 41.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Arthur Wills (University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
Paraphrased from a lecture by Eugene Thacker, New School for Social Research, January 30, 2018.
Weil, Gravity and Grace.
Chris Kraus, Aliens and Anorexia (Semiotext(e), 2000), 26.
James, Varieties, 455. Resistance to food is relatively common among female mystics, and is often interpreted as a willful negation of the gendered body, related to ideals of purity and virginity. In light of the way mystics describe their own experiences, these readings seem reductive.
“The mystical subject loses all distinction—including the distinction of subject and object, self and world—and yet it is somehow still able to comprehend this loss of distinction.” Thacker, “Wayless Abyss,” 83.
Kraus, Aliens and Anorexia, 27.
Kraus, Aliens and Anorexia, 48. Regarding the psychiatric patient, Laing wrote: “If we look at his actions as ‘signs’ of a ‘disease,’ we are already imposing our categories of thought on to the patient.” But “such data are all ways of not understanding him.” Laing, Divided Self, 33.
David Tompkins, “Weird Ecology: On the Southern Reach Trilogy,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 30, 2014 →.
Wendy Chun, lecture, “The Proxy and its Politics” conference, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, June 24, 2017.
VanderMeer, 130. Tellingly, Chris Kraus describes experiencing grief as a sort of hyperobject, composed of “concentric rings of sadness. You close your eyes and travel outward through a vortex that draws you towards the saddest thing of all. And the saddest thing of all isn’t anything like sadness. It’s too big to see or name. Approaching it’s like seeing God. It makes you crazy. Because as you fall you start to feel yourself approaching someplace from which it will not be possible to retrace your steps back out.” Kraus, Aliens and Anorexia, 105.
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 594.
Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 590. For her part, the biologist has no illusions about her knowledge being anything but situated, her sight anything but bodily. “I knew from experience how hopeless this pursuit, this attempt to weed out bias, was. Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.”[footnote VanderMeer, 8
Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 592. “Objectivity cannot be about fixed vision when what counts as an object is precisely what world history turns out to be about.” Ibid., 588.
Kraus, Aliens and Anorexia, 114.
Leslie Allison, “The Ecstasy and the Empathy,” BLOCK (forthcoming 2018). VanderMeer said in an interview: “I think any time you see more connection, whether you see connections on the human level or just in general about what we call the natural world, there’s more of a chance for empathy, and understanding and inhabiting a different point of view. And I think that’s what we really need. Beyond just like, you know, converting to solar.” Timothy Small, “The Strangling Fruit,” The Towner, July 10 2016 →.
Hollywood, Acute Melancholia, 187.
Tompkins, “Weird Ecology.”
Thanks to Eugene Thacker and Simon Critchley for their course on mysticism at the New School for Social Research in Spring 2018. Thanks also to Jess Loudis for the essay title.