The Zone of Exception and the New Normal of the Anthropocene

Historically, zones of exception have been employed to control undesired peoples and disease. The ghetto, the camp, and the quarantine zone all spring from a demand to manage and sometimes eradicate contaminants that the surrounding environment deems to be undesirous. Indeed, from the sixteenth-century Venetian Ghetto over the infamy of the twentieth-century Warsaw Ghetto and on to the banlieues of present-day Paris or the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, urban zones of containment have been in effect for centuries. While some of these urban zones of confinement have been directly enforced by violence (the Warsaw Ghetto), allowing little to no exchange between the zone of containment and the outside world, most of them have mainly been indirectly limited by socioeconomic forces (the Chicago South Side, Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, Glasgow’s East End). Prisons, asylums, and camps, on the other hand, tend to be far more rigorously controlled by physical force. In all cases, whether they are motivated by financial, medical, racial, or criminal concerns, ghettos, camps, asylums, and prisons are all intended to contain and control the movement of people who are deemed undesirable and perhaps also dangerous by the larger community in which they find themselves. Quarantine zones are different in that they are far more broadly defined in terms of their subject matter. Originating from the Italian quaranta giorni, from the forty days that foreigners were forced to wait before entering a city during the reign of the Black Death,2 quarantine zones have evolved to refer to the containment of life-forms other than human, primarily animals but on occasion also plants as well as a range of hazardous material. Other than disease (e.g., the plague, hoof-and-mouth disease, Dutch elm disease), quarantine zones can also be invoked by, for instance, gas leaks, oil spills, or nuclear fallout. Most recently and spectacularly so, quarantine has of course been evoked in a wide manner of ways due to the outbreak of Covid-19 and the following pandemic that, at the time of writing, is still raging.

In film and fiction, the notion of containment through quarantine has been employed for many different purposes. From the vaguely defined plague of Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947) on to Jose Saramago’s magical realist onset of a mass epidemic of the sudden loss of sight in Blindness (1995), literature has repeatedly explored the brutal indifference and absurdity with which power operates in the zones of containment elicited by the state of exception. It makes a regular appearance in science fiction too, with science fiction film in particular routinely employing the quarantine zone as a safeguard against the potential danger of an extraterrestrial menace. In some cases, these visitations turn out to be benign (Close Encounters of the Third Kind [1977], E.T. [1982], District 9 [2009], Arrival [2016]), whereas in others, they prove, as suspected, to be malevolent (Alien [1979], The Thing [1982], Life [2017]). In either case, they invariably turn out to be either unnecessary or insufficient. As a mechanism of division and control, the lessons learned are that such machinery is unjust and harmful or that it cannot be enforced strictly enough.

We see the latter taken to its logical extreme once we enter the gothic territory of the infection narrative and in particular that of zombie fiction, film, and games. Overwhelmed and overrun by the zombie horde, the central plot device of almost all zombie tales is the drive of the human survivors to ensure distance and division between the living and the dead, a need that is almost without a fault geographically envisaged by the protagonists’ continuous (and continuously unsuccessful) quest for a territory cleansed of zombie influence. In fiction, as in real life, containment zones can, however, also be evoked to keep out and exclude normality, rather than the other way around. The containment zones of experimental weapons testing like Los Alamos National Laboratory or the highly secretive commercial labs of Apple, Google, and Huawei are in place not to secure the safety of the general public but to safeguard the development of innovations so fundamental that they will in time upend the status quo forever. Eventually released into the greater world beyond the containment zone, nuclear bombs and smartphones were never intended to be contained ad infinitum. Also, once they were in fact released into the greater world, they ended up having such a radical effect on “normality” as to fundamentally change it forever.

This proves a telling dilemma of the containment zone as a state of exception, namely, whether it signifies a breach of the normal that must be quarantined so as to be rectified or destroyed or whether the abnormalities of the state of exception are in fact heralding a paradigm change that will mean the beginning of a new normal. As pointed out by Alison Bashford in Quarantine: Local and Global Histories (2016), such ambiguity has historically always destabilized the supposed strict demarcations of such zones in that “quarantine was at once part of the world forged through connections of capital, trade and empire, and one of the responses perceived to hinder those connections.”3 Indeed, as the repeatedly breached quarantine zones of science fiction and zombie fictions remind us, containment zones are bound to fail simply because they are the exception to the rule. As a state outside the normal, any containment zone will over time suffer unintended breakdown of its barriers or turn out to become the norm as the rules of normality are rewritten around it. This is of course precisely also what fascinates but also bothers Holocaust philosophers like Giorgio Agamben. For decades viewed as extreme states of exception in which the rules and norms of civilization were temporarily set aside, the possibility that the atrocities committed in the camps were not in fact the exception but the rule of modern society is almost as horrifying to contemplate as the actual atrocities themselves.4

As a concept originating from the attempt at restoring normative (human) mastery, the containment zone may historically have acted as a place of enforced equilibrium of a supposed ideal normality, but it has philosophically and imaginatively often acted in the opposite capacity. In the readings of Lovecraft and VanderMeer that are to follow, I will argue that while the zones of exclusion and containment envisioned in the two texts are employed for very different purposes, they do at least initially come to the same conclusion, which is to say, in the grand scheme of things, the human matters not at all. Both texts can therefore be seen to channel a widespread conception of the Anthropocene as a state of exception defined by an “anthropogenic planet that is predicted to defy all prediction,”5 while also making clear what humanity in its anthropocentric worldview has conveniently but naively ignored, namely, that any attempt at human control and prediction has always been a sham. Accordingly, “‘Anthropocene’ is the first fully antianthropocentric concept,” Timothy Morton has suggested, for while it may seem to elevate the human as an all-powerful force, it in fact dethrones it “from its pampered, ostensibly privileged place set apart from all other beings.” Trapped as we are in the “vicelike death grip of a gigantic entity—ourselves as the human species,”6 humanity finds itself to be peculiarly omnipotent and impotent at the same time. As Claire Colebrook points out, the very era named after us is thus also the era that most poignantly reminds us that “there was a time, and there will be a time, without humans: this provides us with a challenge both to think beyond the world as it is for us, and yet remain mindful that the imagining of the inhuman world always proceeds from a positive human failure.”7 Significantly, we see the development of such “positive human failure” played out in both Lovecraft and VanderMeer, but with very different consequences.

Lovecraft’s Cosmic Humanist Pessimism

Zones of containment and the state of exception are central to many of H. P. Lovecraft’s narratives as well as fundamental to his overall philosophy and worldview. As Mark Fisher has pointed out, “Lovecraft’s stories are obsessively fixated on the question of the outside: an outside that breaks through in encounters with anomalous entities from the deep past, in altered states of consciousness, in bizarre twists in the structure of time. The encounter with the outside often ends in breakdown and psychosis. Lovecraft’s stories frequently involve a catastrophic integration of the outside into an interior that is retrospectively revealed to a delusive envelope, a sham.”8 In “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), for instance, the protagonist discovers a sculpture of a frightful and fantastical being, the great Cthulhu, but eventually realizes that the monster is real and that he will from this point on be hunted by Cthulhu worshippers, but even more terrifyingly that “mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things on earth.”9 Similar revelations take place in “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936), in which a group of scientists travel to Antarctica on a scientific journey only to discover an ancient city of “the Elder Things,” a race of alien beings, as well as a giant monster—the shoggoth—that end up chasing them out of the city. While one surviving member of the expedition goes insane, the other must forever after live with the terrible conviction that “it is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone.”10 And in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936), the protagonist decides to investigate the provincial town of Innsmouth but gets more than he bargains for. Initially shocked to discover that the town is populated by the human/monstrous hybrid descendants of “the deep ones,” a race of monstrous species from the bottom of the sea, the narrator eventually realizes that he himself is turning into a deep one and that he, too, will enter the sea and become one of them.

Common to all these stories is the transformation of their protagonist-narrators from relatively confident, and content, (human) beings certain of their place and their importance in the world, followed by a descent into a state of horror as they realize just how insignificant human lives, and humanity at large, are in the grander scheme of things. As David Peak remarks, Lovecraft’s fiction can therefore be said to be characterized by

the horror of the void: humans coming face to face with displacement, alienation, and the meaninglessness of life. . . . The great revelations contained within Lovecraft’s stories suggest that man’s place among the stars lie in darkness. . . . In this sense, the true purpose of the void is to create a portal to the beyond—from within. Much like the remnants of an ancient society created by primordial beings buried deep below the earth’s crust, the void cosmically infects the inner with the outer. Essentially, the internalization of horror ultimately leads to a cosmic understanding of one’s own meaninglessness.11

In “coming face to face” with the “horror of the void,” it is important to note that Lovecraft’s protagonists never come to terms with it. At first detecting some anomaly—a state of exception in that which they have until now considered to be normal—this initially limited zone of horror inadvertently expands to the point at which “the void cosmically infects the inner with the outer,” to the point at which there is nothing but horror left. In Lovecraft’s world, it is not possible to “face” the void and come out the other end. The protagonist of a Lovecraft story will inevitably end up insane, dead, or, at very least, forlorn, lost, and terrified in the cosmic horror of realizing the insignificance of humankind. The rest of humankind may continue to live on in blissful ignorance of its own insignificance. But the protagonist-narrator has internalized the void, always conscious of its indifference to human affairs.

This sense of a loss of control, of letting in the void and seeing the earth’s crust as well as our own bodies and psyches “infected” by “the outside” of the cosmos, has led to a recent renaissance of Lovecraft’s writing in a surprising array of fields. Conservative, male, white, fiercely racist and misogynist, zoophobic and anthropocentric,12 Lovecraft is hardly the obvious choice for posthumanist scholars advocating care for the animal, the vegetative, and the planetary, and yet his writing has resonated widely with a range of thinkers of the nonhuman and materialist turns.13 As Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock have argued in their Introduction to Age of Lovecraft (2016), one of several recent edited anthologies on Lovecraft,14 the author has become so popular that he “now seems to be everywhere, cropping up in places both anticipated and surprising.”15 In her review of Sederholm and Weinstock’s book for the LA Review of Books, Alison Sperling affirms this as she muses on her own bewildered and even embarrassing continued interest in a writer with whom she, as “someone invested in non-oppressive, queer, and feminist critiques of literature and culture,” knows she does not share many, if indeed any, values. The answer to this renewed and often surprising interest in a writer who should by accounts of his misogyny and racism alone have been rendered obsolete, Sperling reasons, is that for all the author’s faults, Lovecraft’s “fiction serves as a link between the modernist period and the contemporary one through this de-emphasis of the human and the inherent inability to fully comprehend the mysteries of the universe. In the Anthropocene . . . it is perhaps clear why a writer with what S. T. Joshi has called Lovecraft’s ‘cosmic pessimism’ would serve as a contemporary philosophical model.”16 In what follows, I will question the degree to which Lovecraft’s cosmic pessimism works as a contemporary philosophical model of the Anthropocene. For while Lovecraft may seem prescient of the Anthropocene in his realization that an anthropocentric worldview is now not only moot but has in fact always been a sham, the fact that he so ardently longs for a world in which anthropocentrism and the distinction between the human and the nonhuman is upheld at any cost, even to the point of ignorance, points to a somewhat different conclusion than what we have seen emerging out of a range of theoretical formations coming out of the materialist and nonhuman turns in recent years.

Reading “The Colour out of Space” in the Anthropocene

“The Colour out of Space” (1927) begins, like many of Lovecraft’s tales, with a protagonist-narrator recalling his first encounter with the anomaly that will in time change his outlook on the world forever. Sent to an area of New England in which “there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut,” the narrator is in his role as a surveyor the spearhead of modernity, sent to do the groundwork for the construction of a reservoir, in time meaning that “the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters.” Warned by the townspeople of Arkham that “the place was evil,” the narrator at first thinks these notions “odd and theatrical.” Yet once “I saw that dark westward angle of glens and slopes for myself, [I] ceased to wonder at anything beside its own elder mystery.” In the zone of abnormality he is about to enter, everything is off, and out of, in some way or other. “The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.”17 This is as much a landscape of excess, then, as of exception, and it is clearly one to which the narrator takes objection.

As the narrator is soon to learn, this strange zone in which everything is too big, too silent, too soft, and too off-color has not always been so transgressively excessive. Prior to what the locals refer to as “the strange days,” these “were not haunted woods.” Yet then came “the meteorite,” “the weird visitor from unknown stellar space,” an entity described as being “nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.”18 Here we see Fisher’s argument regarding Lovecraft’s obsession with “the question of the outside” as well as Peak’s “horror of the void” neatly aligning in what Lovecraft describes as “that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force, and entity.”19 After the meteorite breaks through the atmosphere and slams into the earth, the area around the impact site soon begins to change, seemingly first for the better, but soon to collapse into decay and disease. The “orchards were prospering as never before” and the “fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss,” yet it turns out that for “all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat.”20 As summer turns to winter and then to spring, it becomes clear that the “outside properties” of the meteor have spread to the surrounding lands, creating a zone in which everything is “very peculiar,” “in a queer way,” “monstrous,” and of “strange colours that could not be put into words.”21 This “chromatic perversion” continues throughout the story, an explosion of visual input “hectic and prismatic,” until suddenly it stops and all turns gray. Plants, crops, flowers, poultry, even the “swine began growing grey and brittle,” spreading a blight throughout the affected zone and eventually leading to the demise of “everything organic,” including a number of unfortunate humans. As the story concludes, a “rainbow of cryptic poison” shoots skyward, and the visitor once again leaves the infected zone behind, yet the land remains tainted by a mark it cannot be rid of.22

In most ways, “The Colour out of Space” follows the standard Lovecraft formula. Yet in terms of the outside influence, the “weird visitor” from “the great outside,” the short story is at one and the same time atypical as well as the inevitable conclusion to a Lovecraftian logic taken to its extreme. First of all, the visitation from the outside did not happen in the ancient prehuman past but within living memory. Second, the visitor is precisely that: a temporary cosmic caller that both literally and ontologically rips open the sheltering sky to let in the cosmic horror from beyond, but then again takes to the void from which it came. Having pierced the sky twice, on entry and exit, it has forever changed not just the actual terrain with which it has been in contact but also the worldviews of those who have witnessed such change. Third, and most significantly, this is a being that is defined solely in terms of the effects it has on the outside world rather than in any bodily or other essential form that can be pinned to a specific physical object or quality.

The latter is particularly important in our reading of the entryway of the “outside” of Lovecraft’s characteristic horror of the void. For, as Michel Houllebecq and Graham Harman (and many others) have pointed out, Lovecraft has a tendency to denote something “unutterable” and “unspeakable,” only to then go on to describe it in overwhelming detail. Writing with “the fury of a demented opera,”23 Lovecraft’s “language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess of surface and aspects of the thing.”24 In “The Colour out of Space,” while as imaginatively excessive as always in his vocabulary, Lovecraft’s monstrous visitor from the void is however reduced, or perhaps exalted, to color and light. Unlike “The Call of Cthulhu,” no comparisons to real or mythic bodily mixtures of “cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings”25 are made, nor to the hybrid humanoid-amphibian masses “alive with a teeming horde of shapes”26 that we encounter in “The Shadow over Innsmouth.” Rather than present a grotesque and monstrous body utterly unlike the human, or a hybrid mix of human and monster both, the monstrous being in “The Colour out of Space” is perhaps best summed up as a “strange beam of ghastly miasma.”27 For, while it arrives on the back of the physical object of a meteorite, the being itself can only be known through the properties of other things and beings as they themselves take on properties that are alien to them. Plants, animals, and humans take on unnatural hues, grow prodigiously, act weirdly, and eventually turn to dust or primeval “ooze and slime.”28 In “The Colour out of Space,” contact with the outside manifests by not manifesting in anything, or anybody, in particular but in a zone in which all life breaks down and shifts shape in a miasma of mixtures in which the very notion of essence, human and otherwise, is no more. Facing such a zone of shapeless and therefore potentially illimitable horror, the narrator can only hope to flee, or at best flood the place in an attempt to forget and contain its existence through the creation of a reservoir, an endeavor that is bound to fail, as the menace clearly refuses to go away.

Reading “The Colour out of Space” from the perspective of an Anthropocene twenty-first century, it is hard not to be reminded, however anachronistically, of contaminated zones of exclusion plagued by radiation and nuclear fallout. Lovecraft’s description of a malign entity manifested solely through light and rays that over time infect an area to greater and greater detrimental effect is oddly prescient of the horrors described in, for instance, John Hersey’s description of the first military use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima (1946), or perhaps even more fittingly of Svetlana Alexievich’s nonfiction account in Chernobyl Prayer (1997) of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl power plant, as in the dramatized but historically highly accurate HBO mini-series Chernobyl (2019). Hersey’s description of a landscape reduced to a “reddish-brown scar, where nearly everything had been buffeted down and burned”;29 Alexievich’s reportage of how the pollution of the land will remain “for thousands of years to come”;30 or the HBO television series’ graphic depiction of human bodies turning to translucent mush due to radiation sickness—all are prefigured by Lovecraft’s short story. In fact, “The Colour out of Space” can certainly be seen as a prophetic forecast of many other kinds of insidious forms of pollution—chemical and biological—introduced in the twentieth century, doubly frightening precisely because they are not directly visible. The zones of containment of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) come to mind, as do later cautionary tales like Marla Cone’s Silent Snow (2005), a reminder that almost half a century post-Carson, not only do we still live in a world in which “pollution knows no borders”31 but the problem has in fact gotten (much) worse.

If we recall the nature of Lovecraft’s cosmic humanist pessimism, though, it is also important to stress that “The Colour out of Space” is precisely not a horror brought on by anthropogenic change, nuclear, chemical, or biological, but by the decidedly nonhuman horror that is explicitly witnessed to come from “out of space.” To read Lovecraft’s tale as a fable of the Anthropocene may therefore seem not only anachronistic but also counterintuitive. In what way, then, can we meaningfully read Lovecraft’s story in the light of the Anthropocene? Furthermore, why is it that so many contemporary thinkers have taken to Lovecraft as a model for contemporary Anthropocene philosophical thought? Before this question can be answered in full, we must turn to Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, as it offers a wildly different approach to the beastly, the monstrous, the human, and the posthuman.

Becoming (Area) X

Justin D. Edwards identifies a “paradigm shift” in contemporary gothic in that the “Gothic monster is not necessarily an icon of terror, threatening humanity by consuming blood or brains or creating more of the undead. In contemporary Gothic, these figures are often humanized and engender sympathy.”32 As opposed to more traditional forms of gothic, in which the protagonist either flees or sets out to vanquish the monster, thereby creating distance or annulment of monstrous difference either through distance or destruction, contemporary gothic tends to annul the terrifying abnormality of the monster through assimilation. Quoting Fred Botting’s claim that in willingly seeking out the monster, “radical difference is diminished: they become familiar, recognized, expected, ‘normal’ rather than ‘monstrous’ monstrosities, domesticated to the point of becoming pets,” Edwards concludes that in contemporary gothic, “monsters are invited into the home.”33

In VanderMeer’s Annihilation, the monstrous has made itself home in what was once a human landscape. The unnamed protagonist, known simply as “the biologist,” is initially tasked with breaching the perimeter of the mysterious and monstrous zone of “Area X” to “continue the government’s investigation.”34 As in “The Colour out of Space,” in which the government-sponsored narrator likewise encounters abandoned “hillside farms, sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar,”35 this, too, is a place where “rotting cabins” remind the biologist that “long ago, towns had existed here” but also a space in which all that is left are “eerie signs of human habitation.”36 Unlike in Lovecraft’s tale, in which the visitation from out of space is clearly and spectacularly marked, it is not entirely clear when or how the strange phenomena that is Area X began. “When Area X first appeared, there was vagueness and confusion,”37 the biologist remarks, and this is a state of affairs that has not cleared up much by the time she arrives, in that confusion and ambiguity seem to rule Area X in every respect. “According to the records we had been shown, the first expedition reported nothing unusual in Area X, just pristine, empty wilderness,” the biologist continues, later describing it as an area “devoid of human life” and as a place of “preternatural silence.”38 Yet if the early expeditions experienced it as a region bereft of the human, later expeditions rediscover human presence, of a kind. Entering the emptied buildings of those who once lived there prior to the appearance of Area X, the biologist sees “peculiar eruptions of moss or lichen, rising four, five, feet tall, misshapen, the vegetative matter forming an approximation of limbs and heads and torsos.” A little later, walking close to a canal, she sees a dolphin that “stared at me with an eye that did not, in that brief flash, resemble a dolphin eye to me. It was painfully human, almost familiar.”39 Other encounters lead the biologist to doubt how to classify the samples of tissue she collects in Area X: “Was it really human? Was it pretending to be human?”40

As the two following volumes of the Southern Reach Trilogy reveal, the biologist will over time herself turn into a human-animal-landscape hybrid, ending up as a leviathan composed of different human, vegetative, animal, and mineral matter. Accordingly, the biologist remarks, in the closing pages of Annihilation, that “the thought of continually doing harm to myself to remain human seems somehow pathetic.”41 Read in comparison to “The Colour out of Space,” we thus see a remarkable range of similarities between the two tales, albeit with one fundamental difference. Both feature a first-person narrator, both are tasked with collecting information about an unruly area of unnaturally vibrant wilderness (indeed, another member of the biologist’s expedition is, like Lovecraft’s narrator, a surveyor), both include strange metamorphoses of the human into nonhuman assemblages, and finally, both stories ultimately revolve around the impossibility of using human classificatory systems to describe a world that refuses to bow to human mastery, let alone recognize the human in the first place. As in Lovecraft’s story, the otherworldly presence ruling Area X can only ever be experienced indirectly, a “faint golden glow”42 shimmering around those who have been in contact with it, as in the metamorphic effect that gradually breaks down any individual form and category so as to merge it with something else. The essence and intent of Area X, if indeed any such thing can be said to exist, seems to be transformation itself.

In terms of the question of turning home, as of their position on the monstrous, Lovecraft’s and VanderMeer’s stories could, however, not have been more different. For while Lovecraft’s narrator always desires to go home, to return to the safe confines of a world in which the human ruled supreme, VanderMeer’s protagonist goes by a very different route. At first compliant with her mission and continuously attempting mastery of the area through the constant collation of “data to process,”43 the biologist becomes increasingly reluctant to honor these demands, culminating in the decision that, as the concluding sentence of the novel reads, “I am not returning home.”44 Not only does the biologist refuse to be domesticized by the scientific and governmental human authority that has so far ruled her life but she also refuses to recognize Area X as “monstrous” in the first place. “Everyone had died or been killed, returned changed or returned unchanged, but Area X had continued on as it always had,”45 the biologist muses as she ponders the remains of the many human lives altered by Area X, and hence concludes that Area X simply is.

From a Lovecraftian perspective, such indifference to human life is precisely what constitutes the hollow and horrific core of his cosmic humanist pessimism—of an ancient evil that puts the human under erasure physically as well as semiotically. Yet, for evil to exist in the world, VanderMeer’s biologist seems to suggest, we need to be able to identify “intent or purpose,” neither of which she can locate in Area X. Similarly, while we may “tell stories of heroism or cowardice, of good decisions and bad decisions,” no such agency can be said to govern Area X, nor can such actions be said to have any effect on it whatsoever. As a zone of exception outside human jurisdiction, Area X seems ruled by one thing, and that is “a kind of inevitability.”46 This the biologist at last accepts and gives in to, while also clearly realizing that the greatest fear of those outside Area X, the people in power, is that the expeditions fail to “hit upon some explanation, some solution, before the world becomes Area X.”47 Ultimately, the one thing the exception zone of Area X has to teach humanity may precisely be that an anthropocentric worldview is the exception and not the rule; hence any attempt at human authority and mastery of the area, and indeed of the world at large, is not only doomed to fail but in fact an aberration.

A Metaphysics of Mixture: From Lovecraft to VanderMeer (and Beyond)

In a comparative analysis of the distinctions between weird fiction and the new weird in general, and the “weird prose” of Lovecraft and VanderMeer in particular, Gry Ulstein suggests that whereas “the traditional weird leans heavily on nihilism [and] does not typically evoke affects like hope or affirmation,” the new weird is far more likely to lean into “hope as an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.”48 While certainly far less negative in tone than “The Colour out of Space,” it is however questionable whether a text like Annihilation is necessarily more “hopeful” than Lovecraft’s story—not that it should be. As E. Ann Kaplan remarks, environmental approaches to anthropogenic change tend to veer toward a “utopian/dystopian duality,” but perhaps a path somewhere between horror and hope would constitute a more constructive approach: “We need both hope and courage in order to change our ways of being, as we seek solutions and adapt to the new world. But we also need to understand and admit the reality of the dire situation—to take that in fully and try to understand the history of how we got here as we seek to deal with it.”49 Acceptance, which is the title of the third and final volume of the Southern Reach series, is perhaps a more fitting term than hope, exemplified nowhere better than in the biologist’s journey into what she at first perceives to be a zone of exception but eventually accepts as something else.

As a biologist “specialized in transitional environments,”50 the narrator is described as having both a disciplinary and a natural affinity with the animal and the vegetative over the human. This is partly due to her knowledge of nonhuman life-forms but mostly due to her interests in transitional ecologies, a liminality of which Area X supplies plenty, in that “within the space of walking only six or seven miles, you went from forest to swamp to salt marsh to beach.”51 This interest in transition and transformation, we eventually learn, mirrors her own mercurial nature, as, of course, her decision to willingly go through with her own metamorphosis into a nonhuman or more-than-human state. Bidding the world of the human goodbye, the biologist warns us on the penultimate page of the novel, “Don’t follow. I’m well beyond you now, and traveling very fast.”52 On a literal level, this is expressed to ward off potential pursuers sent to chase her down by the human world outside Area X. On another literary and figurative level, it is a nod toward us, her (human) readers, who must at the end of the novel necessarily be left behind. Bogged down by our human bodies, our human worldview, and our human language, we cannot possibly hope to keep up with that which was once the biologist but is soon to be something else. Far “beyond us” and “traveling very fast” toward a new state of being, the testimony to the earlier stage of this journey—this the text we are holding in our hands—must at some point end. Yet if we, her human readership, cannot follow her any further, at least we are left with an idea of how better to conceive, or rather fail to conceive, the place and the state of being toward which the biologist is heading.

“Like a horror movie, evolution is as much about disintegration as it is about things coming together,”53 Timothy Morton remarks, in part recognizing that such a realization would from a Lovecraftian perspective lead to terror and revulsion. The “cataclysmic molting”54 that VanderMeer’s biologist at first observes and eventually becomes part of in (and of) Area X does not lead to horror though. As Benjamin R. Robertson argues in his reading of Annihilation, “Area X does not presuppose a complete world before violation because Area X is not an invasive force from a spatial outside or a temporal afterward. It is what already exists here around us, affecting us while remaining imperceptible to and unaffected by us.”55 What Area X ultimately teaches the biologist, and perhaps also us as readers, is that we can never stand apart from the world. Initially defined as a zone of exception, Area X proves to be the very opposite, exemplifying French philosopher Emanuele Coccia’s notion of a “metaphysics of mixture” in which “being in the world no longer means finding oneself in an infinite space that contains everything else; it means being no longer able to experience being in a place without finding this place in yourself, and thus becoming the place of your place.”56

Ultimately, Area X turns out not to be the zone of exception but the rule, reinstating the order of things as they always were. Whether it is that of Morton’s “ecology without nature,” Donna Haraway’s “sympoiesis” described as a “becoming with,” or Eben Kirksey’s “unruly assemblages,” where “emerging ecologies” spring from environments that cannot be said to clearly belong to nature or culture,57 VanderMeer’s novel is therefore in line with a general trend in environmental humanities responding to the conceptual and concrete problems of the Anthropocene with a recognition of the necessity to shed former supposed boundaries between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, individual and environment. As Robertson concludes, “Area X’s refusal to reveal itself fully to the human does not indicate there is more to it. . . . It knows nothing of partialness or wholeness because it can neither be analyzed nor contained. It is there all along, too big and too close to see.”58 To observe the world, we the human have to stand apart from it. Yet even as we attempt to do so, this proves a futile gesture, as it proves that “we,” the human, never really were. Moving forward, there is no way around, no temporary state of exception, no retreat from the dark, no escaping the zone, the monstrous, the weird. We can only, like the biologist, go through.

Notes

1. Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 11.

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2. Jane Stevens Crawshaw, “The Places and Spaces of Early Modern Maritime Quarantine,” in Quarantine: Local and Global Histories, ed. Alison Bashford (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 16.

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3. Alison Bashford, “Maritime Quarantine: Linking Old World and New World Histories,” in Bashford, Quarantine, 11.

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4. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 166, or Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 20.

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5. Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 9.

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6. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 24–25.

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7. Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 1:32–33.

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8. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 16.

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9. H. P. Lovecraft, “Call of Cthulhu,” in Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark (London: Grafton, 1985), 79.

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10. H. P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness,” in Omnibus 1: At the Mountains of Madness (London: Grafton, 1985), 138.

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11. David Peak, The Spectacle of the Void (New York: Schism, 2014), 59–60.

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12. See, e.g., Gina Wisker, “‘Spawn of the Pit’: Lavinia, Marceline, Medusa, and All Things Foul: H. P. Lovecraft’s Liminal Women,” in New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft, ed. David Simmons (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); Jed Mayer, “Race, Species, and Others: H. P. Lovecraft and the Animal,” in The Age of Lovecraft, ed. Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); or James Kneale, “‘Indifference Would Be Such a Relief’: Race and Weird Geography in Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff’s Dialogues with H. P. Lovecraft,” in Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities, ed. Julius Greve and Florian Zappe (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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13. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2011); Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2015); or Eric Wilson, The Republic of Cthulhu (New York: Punctum Books, 2016).

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14. See also David Simmons’s edited volume New Critical Essays on H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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15. Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “Introduction: Lovecraft Rising,” in The Age of Lovecraft, ed. Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 1.

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16. Alison Sperling, “Acknowledgment Is Not Enough: Coming to Terms with Lovecraft’s Horrors,” March 4, 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/acknowledgment-not-enough-coming-terms-lovecrafts-horrors/.

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17. Sperling; H. P. Lovecraft, “The Colour out of Space,” in Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark (London: Grafton, 1985), 236–37.

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18. Lovecraft, 241 and 243.

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19. Lovecraft, 244.

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20. Lovecraft, 245.

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21. Lovecraft, 246–47.

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22. Lovecraft, 248, 252, 265, 267.

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23. Michel Houllebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006), 49.

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24. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester, U.K.: Zero Books, 2011), 25.

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25. Lovecraft, “Call,” 90.

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26. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” in Omnibus 3, 444.

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27. Lovecraft, “Colour,” 262.

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28. Lovecraft.

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29. John Hersey, Hiroshima (London: Penguin, 2002), 67.

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30. Svetlana Alexievich, Chernobyl Prayer, trans. Anna Gunin and Arch Tait (London: Penguin, 2016), 136.

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31. Martha Cone, Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 7.

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32. Justin D. Edwards, “Contemporary American Gothic,” in American Gothic, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 72.

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33. Edwards.

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34. Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (London: 4th Estate, 2014), 4.

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35. Lovecraft, “Colour,” 237.

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36. VanderMeer, Annihilation, 5.

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37. VanderMeer, 94.

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38. VanderMeer, 55 and 95.

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39. VanderMeer, 96–97.

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40. VanderMeer, 73.

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41. VanderMeer, 194.

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42. VanderMeer, 61.

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43. VanderMeer, 33.

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44. VanderMeer, 33 and 195.

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45. VanderMeer, 158.

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46. VanderMeer.

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47. VanderMeer, 159.

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48. Gry Ulstein, “‘Through the Eyes of Area X’: (Dis)Locating Ecological Hope via New Weird Spatiality,” in Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities, ed. Julius Greve and Florian Zappe (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 130–31.

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49. E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 147.

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50. Kaplan, 11.

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51. Kaplan, 12.

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52. Kaplan, 194.

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53. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolois: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 44.

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54. Morton, 193.

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55. Benjamin J. Robertson, None of This Is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 115.

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56. Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, trans. Dylan J. Montanari (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 71.

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57. Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–65; Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Eben Kirksey, Emergent Ecologies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 218.

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58. Robertson, None of This Is Normal, 122.

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