“15” in “Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth”
15
Erotics and Annihilation
Caitlín R. Kiernan, Queering the Weird, and Challenges to the “Anthropocene”
Sara Wasson
“Weird” writing’s preoccupations with geological spans of “deep time,” the inadequacy of human reason, and the mutual entanglements of material organic and inorganic all mesh well with the goal of decentering Anthropos. This chapter examines Caitlín R. Kiernan’s stories of ancient stone, abyssal sea, and sexualized violation to illustrate how a weird poetics may simultaneously limit and enrich nonanthropocentric “arts of noticing,” while remaining wary of elevating all weird to an ideal response.1 Kiernan’s imagining of the more-than-human encounter evokes Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene in certain ways, a vision of the way “critters—human and not—become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time.”2 While Haraway here recognizes “every scale and register,” her writing mostly emphasizes mutual, intricate, often joyful intermeshing—“speaking resurgence to despair” (71). Kiernan’s writing, by contrast, features a very different register and dynamic: asymmetrical relationships in which the human may become annihilated substratum. While much of Haraway’s language evokes playfulness and mutuality, Kiernan’s emphasizes solemnity, awe, and the numinous. Kiernan’s weird involves not only defeat of human reason or disgust at contamination but also desire for such boundary crossing, abasement, terror, and violation. Although Kiernan is very different from Haraway in this way, at moments she offers what I suggest calling the Chthulucene in a minor key: her hallucinatory tableaux of desire and torment meld ancient past and strangely beautiful futurities—albeit ones that are no longer, except in a haunted sense, human.3
I use the term more-than-human rather than nonhuman because, as Susan Leigh Star observes, “nonhuman is like non-white. It implies a lack of something.”4 The term more-than-human reminds us that “the non-human world not only exists but has causal powers and capacities of its own” and “highlight[s] the absolute dependence of humans on a vast and complex array of nonhuman entities, only some of which are subject to human control.”5 The term usefully chastens arrogance about human agency and offers a fitting humility to our encounters with other creatures, plants, and inorganic material—stone, for example, moves, has force and generative capacities, and—arguably—even forms of agency and desire. As Jeffrey Cohen notes, for example, stone comprises “boisterous landscapes. Full of relation, teeming with narrative, stone is seldom inert,”6 even if our own perceptions and fleeting timescales are inadequate to the task of fully perceiving this lithic vitality.
As described in the Introduction to this collection, “weird” writing is typically defined in terms of defeat of human reason and a profound affective response.7 China Miéville describes weird as fundamentally about a vulnerable encounter with absolute otherness: the sense that “through the little tears, from behind the ragged / edges/ things are looking at us.”8 Although H. P. Lovecraft and writers of the periodical Weird Tales are the best known early practitioners, the twenty-first century has seen weird flourish into arcane new blooms.9 Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964–) is a celebrated contemporary writer of weird, hailed as “perhaps the best weird writer of her generation.”10 Author of more than 240 short stories, ten novels, and a monthly magazine of “weird erotica,” she is also a vertebrate paleontologist. Her fiction is informed by her interest in deep time and monstrous forms.11 Her oeuvre resists genre classification: while much is horrifying, she resists the label of genre horror on the grounds that her affective reach is more broad.12
To date, academic commentary on Kiernan has often focused on her representation of social exclusion or her development within a Lovecraftian tradition.13 Kiernan is transgender, a woman and a lesbian, and the experience of multiple marginalizations has influenced her work. James Goho argues, for example, that Kiernan’s writing “pushes upon readers our biological self in all of its fragility, despair and hurt . . . to illustrate the destructive force of socially constructed norms and standards that marginalize individuals.”14 While conceding that some of her work grapples with marginalization, however, Kiernan herself has said that “I don’t feel like I write many ‘message’ stories, not in a political sense.”15 As I will show, Kiernan’s melancholy tableaux of sexualized violation also do something else: they invite us to consider an imaginative relationship to the more-than-human that is transformative, devastating, and beautiful, even if it does not include our own survival. These stories are not only about bewilderment and disgust but about something else: a craving for that transformation. In the process, her writing resists some pervasive critical oversimplifications about what “weird” can offer to deanthropocentric “arts of noticing,” as well as showing, by contrast, how weird tropes and conventions may unexpectedly risk exacerbating a text’s anthropocentricism.
Weird fantasies of surrender to the more-than-human are not new. Lovecraft’s short story “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936), for example, concludes with the narrator imagining descending through the sea, “through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’hanthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amid wonder and glory for ever.”16 Yet, as S. T. Joshi notes, Kiernan’s writing has “a plangency that his narratives lack . . . teas[ing] out the emotive ramifications of . . . the bizarre, terrifying, at times ineffable scenes.”17 Central to this plangency is a longing for connection with or submission to more-than-human entities, while not denying the pain and grief that ensue from such violation. Jeff VanderMeer observes:
The people in these stories don’t really survive their encounter with the supernatural. . . . The supernatural isn’t something terrifying in Kiernan’s view—it can be, but that’s not the true point. . . . [It] is also something beautiful and unknowable in intent, and often wedded to the natural world. . . . In almost all of these stories . . . the characters seem to encounter the supernatural as part of a need for connection, even if the thing they connect with is Other and will be the death of them.18
Kiernan’s scenarios trouble conventional sanctities of corporeal boundary and use rhythmic, image-rich prose to emphasize the human participant’s dread and desire. Joshi observes that “even in those passages whose subject-matter is perfectly chaste, her prose beckons us with a lapidary manipulation of rhythm.”19 Her sensuous writing presents human animals enmeshed with more-than-human forces in mysterious and profoundly asymmetrical ways.
Her work abounds in tableaux of corporeal and mental suffering. Among other things, it shows human bodies violated and transformed in abject ways by themselves or by others20 or characters fascinated by the aftermath of another’s violation.21 Goho describes some of her corporeal reconfigurations of the human as “anthro-technological bodies,” such as a violin made of bones, blood, and guts or a chandelier made from a surgically altered woman.22 With regard to the “arts of noticing,” Kiernan’s tableaux of specifically more-than-human violation offer entry points for readers’ affective engagement with both human fragility—usually feared and avoided—and also the potential of transformation, to be feared, yes, and even potentially ending in annihilation, yet also offering awe-full nonanthropocentric futures for which human bodies may serve as a literal substrate.
The Work of Weird: Challenging or Reinforcing Anthropocentrism?
As many critics have argued, weird writing may fruitfully disrupt anthropocentrism by showing the defeat of human rational comprehension and geological scales of time and evoking revulsion, unease, and awe. I will briefly address this reading but then proceed to challenge and nuance this accepted perspective within gothic studies.
Core to much writing against anthropocentrism is the need to respect the recalcitrance and opacity of the more-than-human. The object-oriented ontology strand of speculative realism is particularly emphatic about this message, as in Timothy Morton’s concept of “hyperobjects,” discussed in the Introduction to this collection.23 A humility toward the unknowability of the more-than-human, and indeed a troubling of the sanctity of “the human” altogether, is also important for critics working in the very different philosophical framework of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conception of entities as “assemblage,” a “hodgepodge” of elements and forces, dynamic and subject to change.24 Deleuze and Guattari offer a range of concepts to describe the emergence, ambiguities, and fractures of assemblages and the “lines of flight” of their becomings and transformations.25 There are important differences between object-oriented ontologists and new materialists, but both emphasize agency in forces and entities other than the human.26 Challenging anthropocentrism requires new “arts of noticing.” As Anatoli Ignatov says, we need art that “increase[s] awareness of our embeddedness within a larger system of forces, energies and flows . . . the coexistence of multiple animal and plant worlds, governed by different temporal modes.”27 Thinking through ecological crisis requires thinking in numerous timescales, from the paleoecological to the momentary to the future horror and silence of the outcomes of our ongoing sixth mass extinction event.28
The challenge for “arts of noticing” is not only conceptual but affective, and the weird’s evocation of unease and disgust is also useful in challenging anthropocentric assumptions. Crucially, however, this constellation of troubled affects is not synonymous with “ecophobia,” as Simon Estok defines it, a contemptuous fear rooted in the delusion of human supremacy.29 Claire Quigley suggests that the weird disrupts a “taken-for-granted anthropocentric worldview” through grotesqueries that “instil a fear of contamination within the human protagonists,” but that statement does not quite capture the affective disturbance attendant on the weird.30 Desire, awe, and terrified fascination are also part of the potential affective repertoire evoked by, for example, Kiernan’s permutations of weird, and these responses, too, can center the more-than-human in potentially useful ways. Writers draw on a language of the eerie, spooky, and numinous to describe the radical unknowability of ecological processes and more-than-human agencies. Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt, Anna Tsing, and Heather Anne Swanson speak of “the spookiness of the past in the present”;31 Morton describes hyperobjects as having a “menacing shadow,” “like faces pressed against a window, they leer at me menacingly”;32 and Eugene Thacker suggests that unease at evacuation of the human is a useful sensibility to foster in response to the ecological catastrophe to which human violence has been so central, even if our meager reason can never fully understand the complex workings of that disaster.33 Since Thomas Friedman coined the term global weirding in 2010, the term has increasingly gained connotations of a blend of epistemological defeat and affective unease in the fate of ecological catastrophe.34
Nonetheless, “weird” fictions of encounters with ancient horrors are not inevitably helpful for nonanthropocentric “arts of noticing,” and some deployments may reinforce certain long-established erasures of the more-than-human. I will identify four potential risks and address how Kiernan’s work partly resists them.
First, the weird’s tendency to ceremonially estrange the more-than-human as devastatingly other may implicitly reinforce the difference between human and more-than-human that characterizes anthropocentric thinking. Yet here, too, weird is weirder than it may seem, because one of the crucial characteristics of weird is that the encounter with the more-than-human is intradiegetically real. Core to its shock is that it has always been here: the characters’ failure to realize its entanglement with their bodies and worlds is a perceptual failure rather than a fantasy. As Fisher says, “what we might call ordinary naturalism—the standard, empirical world of common sense and Euclidean geometries—will be shredded by the end of each tale, it is replaced by a hypernaturalism—an expanded sense of what the material cosmos contains.”35 Kiernan’s bacterial erotics, as I will show, are a particularly vivid exemplar of this move. The more-than-human is not separate from, distant from, the human—the human is the more-than-human, in the most practical sense, always transcorporeal, as Stacy Alaimo puts it: “the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’ . . . ‘Nature’ is always as close as one’s own skin—perhaps even closer.”36
Second, fantasies of monstrous violation may risk reinstating human significance, if a single human is singled out as meriting the weird entity’s attention due to some quality in that individual. Some of Kiernan’s work does present figures chosen for particular torment (e.g., Angevine of the short story “Houses under the Sea” [2003] or the narrator of “Far from Any Shore” [2014]), but these figures are not chosen for intrinsic qualities but due to ill luck; the ensuing violations are opportunistic.37 All Kiernan’s writing emphasizes human insignificance amid deep time and cosmic vastness; as she says, “our smallness and insignificance in the universe at large. In all possible universes. Within the concept of infinity. No one and nothing cares for us. No one’s watching out for us.”38 Her work unremittingly shows us humans as just . . . not that special.
Third, representations of encounters with ancient horror as singular, astonishing events may distract from the way that multiple timescales always operate in the present and, relatedly, may obscure the fact that the Anthropocene is also a Capitalocene, an era of ecological crisis accelerated by the transformations of industry and political economy.39 The workings of capital hinge on such time scales, in, for example, petroculture extraction: the energy-hungry machine of world capital running on “a Tellurian entity [formed] under unimaginable pressure and heat in the absence of oxygen and between the strata.”40 Jason W. Moore encourages us to “see human organization as something more-than-human and less-than-social” and to ask, “how do specific combinations of human and extra-human activity work—or limit—the endless accumulation of capital?”41 In this regard, Kiernan’s characters’ encounters with the more-than-human happen, not in a vacuum, but in contexts shaped by capitalism and human activity, such as mines shaped through extraction capitalism in the previous century, a municipal water feature in a public park, a deep-sea space traversed by submarines funded for deepwater research, and military space exploration. In the short story “In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888)” (2003), the rocks of the Appalachias underpin industries and socialities: “limestone is overlain by . . . reddish sandstone . . . lifeblood of the city locked away in those strata, clotthick [sic] veins of hematite for the coke ovens and blast furnaces dotting the valley below.”42 The anthropomorphism of this passage has the paradoxical consequence of showing the human community as inevitably also more-than-human. The human community’s “lifeblood” is geological, from “clotthick veins of hematite.”
A fourth potential risk of weird is that it may singularize the more-than-human and erase its networks. Weird fiction is not the only discourse that tends to singularize the strange: “factual” descriptions of abyssal sea zones, for example, have a long lineage of problematic representation in this regard. Alaimo observes that deep-sea zones are often represented in our cultural imaginary as empty spaces, to be crossed or reached through or under, and Philip Steinberg argues that part of the failure to recognize the diversity and teeming life of the deep ocean stems from the way mercantile capitalism has tended to see oceans as things to cross; and of course, extractive petrocultures configure the rock beneath the ocean as resource.43 The vitality in the depth of oceans has often been effaced, with widespread and inaccurate assumptions that all life on earth relies ultimately on plant photosynthesis of the sun’s energy. In fact, in ocean zones beyond sunlight, chemosynthesis supports food chains of abundant life and many times more species than are found on land. Representations of such life, however, are often impoverished in a particular way. The convention in cataloging is for vivid, single creatures hanging suspended in deep black.44 Photographers describe the work taken to edit the image to make it uniformly black, and Alaimo warns that in such representations, “the substance, agencies, and significance of the seas disappear. . . . The backdrop belies not only the vast expanse of the oceans but the intra-acting material agencies of oceanic ecologies and human entanglements.”45 The weird’s tendency to concentrate on opaque, single entities meshes well with the object-oriented ontology strand of speculative realism, which emphasizes the opacity and self-containment of any entity (including ourselves) but fits less easily with vital materialism, focused as it is on networks and intermeshed assemblage.
Kiernan’s story “Houses under the Sea” resists some of those erasures. Scientific dredging is presented as disrupting marine ecologies and the complexity of the water recognized. When the narrator watches the recording of the deep-sea spaces two kilometers below the surface, he does not see undifferentiated black.
The steady fall of marine snow becomes so heavy that it’s difficult to see much of anything through the light reflecting off the whitish particles of sinking detritus. . . .
“It’s a little bit of everything,” [he imagines Angevine saying]. . . . “Silt, phytoplankton and zooplankton, soot, mucus, diatoms, pellets, dust, grains of sand and clay, radioactive fallout, pollen, sewage. Some of it’s even interplanetary dust sparticles. Some of it fell from the stars.”46
Similarly, in the short story “Bridle” (2006), when a female kelpie kisses a human woman, the latter tastes “silt and algae, fish shit and . . . fine particulate filth.”47 At moments such as these, Kiernan’s weird does not wholly reduce strangeness and grotesquerie to a conveniently single entity but broadens her attention to the blurry edges that characterize all entities, including ourselves. More than that, her work invites us to imagine a state of being compelled and appalled by the more-than-human, yearning for transformation—even annihilation—under its force. Like the cult members of “Houses under the Sea” (2003), her characters are “dazed, terrified, enraptured, lost.”48
Queering Delight and/or Annihilation in the Chthulucene
As the Introduction to this book notes, multiple -cenes have been theorized to rectify the anthropocentricism of the concept of the Anthropocene. One such coinage in particular is especially useful in counteracting the risks to weird representation, risks that I identified in the foregoing discussion. Haraway’s concept of the “Chthulucene” recognizes all life and inorganic material as enmeshed, located and combined in intricate assemblage, emphasizing mutual enfleshment and corporeal entanglement, the mutual constitutiveness of beings.49 Her term Chthulucene is not homage to Lovecraft’s version of the monster but emphasizes chthonic enmeshing between human animal and more-than-human.50
Figure 15.1. Jellyfish. Pixabay, Creative Commons, 2016. https://jooinn.com/white-sea-creature.html/.
Haraway’s description of the Chthulucene is emotionally complex and includes grief, for any response “must include mourning irreversible losses.”51 Yet, the abiding quality emerging in Haraway’s descriptions is horizontal connection, mutuality, and playful, delighted intimacy. Haraway’s framework for the Chthulucene is capacious and absolutely has room for abjection and suffering, but that slant is not emphasized in her prose. Kiernan’s approach, by contrast—equally entangled, equally monstrous—is shot through with a blend of abjection and awe, a sense of an annihilating sublime. Like Haraway, her writing explores bodies entangled, but this entanglement occurs in registers of suffering and forbidden desire. In some ways, solemnity, awe, and a sense of the numinous may also have value in decentering the Anthropos. Eileen Crist warns that anthropocentric history has
unfolded by silencing nonhuman others, who do not [get recognized as entities that can] speak, possess meanings, experience perspectives, or have a vested interest in their own identities. These others have been de facto silenced because if they once spoke to us in other registers—primitive, symbolic, sacred, totemic, sensual, or poetic—they have receded so much they no longer convey such numinous turns of speech.52
Kiernan’s fleshly and monstrous entanglements are distinctly less friendly and democratic than better-known instantiations of the Chthulucene yet may also be useful in their disturbance and asymmetry.
Corporeal and psychological agony have been a preoccupation of gothic ever since it emerged as a literary form in the late eighteenth century and, later, became a mode inhabiting other genres, including the weird tale.53 Gothic offers “an image language for bodies and their terrors,” says David Punter, and evokes, in Steven Bruhm’s words, “the body’s repressed fragility and vulnerability.”54 Yet the paradox of gothic has always been that pleasure attends this suffering, pleasure for the reader and sometimes also pleasure for characters indulging forbidden longings.55 Pain and counterhegemonic pleasure are also inextricably entangled in Kiernan’s descriptions of more-than-human encounter, as in the way her protagonists desire erotic destruction56 or in the way her work’s futurities do not echo heteronormative reproductive notions of futurity,57 or in the way her work enacts an ethics of recognizing other life-forms as profoundly other but in intense relation with us.58 Without disputing the value in those approaches—queering hardly happens in one way, after all—the term queering, laden as it is with the connotations of “strange” and “wrong,” can also suggest other kinds of sensual transgression. In Kiernan’s writing, desire is often transgressive and taboo, self-destructive, even annihilatory, yielding not domesticated security but radical uncertainty, pain, and change. Put that way, this kind of queering reminds us of Lee Edelman’s critique of reproductive futurity, in which the structuring trope of a society is the imagined future of a child who serves as “the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.”59 Edelman suggests “queerness” may strategically refuse such futurity, “nam[ing] the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’ . . . outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism”; “the queer must insist on disturbing, on queering, social organization as such. . . . For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.”60
Kiernan’s work certainly troubles futurities imagined for the idealized child, yet her work exceeds an interpretation derived from Edelman’s work. First, like Haraway’s, her writing is less concerned with human society and more concerned with connections with the more-than-human. Haraway and Edelman are answering very different questions and in very different emotional registers, yet both are rightly suspicious of the way futurities tend to function to limit awareness. Haraway defines the “Chthulucene” as “a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth”; her focus is “tales of the ongoing.”61 Edelman embraces the defiant subversive possibility of negating a future orientation as part of resistance to conventional heteronormativity; Haraway embraces a gleeful, intimate framework of entangled monstrosity to help readers imagine other modes of sociality and being, across species lines. Edelman urges us to resist the seductive idealization of the (white, privileged) child, and Haraway urges us to “make kin, not babies!”—in other words, to connect cross-species with other entities in the present, rather than being oriented to a longitudinal scale of future human reproduction.62
Kiernan’s writing both echoes and offers a twist to each of these approaches. Her dominant affective registers are desire and dread, and she challenges any human-centric reproductive futurity, but does it in a very particular way. Much of her writing is actually preoccupied with generation, but with human bodies functioning as partial substrate for such reproduction and consumed in the process. Several of her stories imagine strangely generative bodies transforming in the act and the more-than-human futurities they evoke. To put it glibly, the bodies of such characters help to make kin and (some version of) babies, but in the service of a future generation that lacks anything recognizable of the human—yet is haunted by it. I will explore how Kiernan’s work presents such change and close by suggesting that visions of such futurity hold hope without anthropocentrism.
“Ancient Bacterial Gods” and Stone with Agency: Humans sas Substrate for More-than-Human Change
The defeat of reason is central to Kiernan’s approach to the weird. She describes her own writing as “almost always” weird in that “it departs from what most people view as the reality. Consensus reality.”63 Human animals are not knowing, and the unknown remains mysterious: she increasingly resists the “reveal” of the supernatural or monstrous elements. “What is weird fiction but a journey into the unknown, and if you make the unknown known, why bother?”64 Her narrators—often paleontologists, geologists, journalists, authors, or other adept readers of signs—fail to make sense of what they encounter. In “Houses under the Sea,” the cult members of the Open Door of Night record their cult leader’s terrible knowledge in floor paintings. The narrator recalls:
The intricate interweave of lines, the lines that she believed would form a bridge, a conduit. . . . Everyone’s seen photographs of that floor, although I’ve yet to see any that do it justice. A yantra. A labyrinth. A writhing, tangled mass of sea creatures straining for a distant black sun. Hindi and Mayan and Chinook symbols. The precise contour lines of a topographic map of Monterey Canyon. Each of these things and all of these things, simultaneously.65
An anthropologist is analyzing the map, but neither she nor the first-person journalist narrator can uncover quite what happened. Similarly, in “Far from Any Shore,” the paleontologist narrator and her colleagues cling to rationality: “We laughed because we’re scientists, and our enlightened, educated minds don’t project superstitious nonsense onto oddly shaped rocks. . . . The wind snatched at our laughter and dragged it off into the night to haunt the ears of mule deer, jackrabbits, and pronghorn antelope.”66 As the final image implies, their forced merriment proves unfounded; two die and one becomes a possessed murderer. At the end of the story, the scientist narrator laments, “Ah, God, how I wanted to make sense here at the end. How I wanted linear narrative and compositional coherence, here at the end.”67 Rationality, science, and even logic are defeated within these stories.
Yet, beyond the defeat of reason, Kiernan’s characters also have a range of intense affective responses to the more-than-human. She often writes from the perspective of a human animal submitting to sexualized degradation by something more-than-human, ancient and strange. Being kissed and forced to swallow silt and waste—so does a human woman describe encountering a kelpie in a decaying urban park.68 The transformations are numerous but almost always painful, such as the lesbian geologist who is tormented by a mystical cold creature in “The Cryomancer’s Daughter” (2006): “I might as well be stone now. She has made of me the very thing I’ve spent my life researching and cataloguing, for what is ice but water assuming a solid mineral form? I am made her petrifaction.”69
Some of Kiernan’s protagonists feel satisfaction in their irrevocable change, as does the supplicant of “The Hole with the Girl in Its Heart” (2005–7), who is swallowed by a star and feels deep gratitude.70 Yet, with a few exceptions, the transformations presented in Kiernan’s fictions are not as much a matter of fellowship as those implied in Haraway’s vision. Kiernan’s encounters are typically violent and annihilatory. In “Houses under the Sea,” for example, cult leader Jacova Angevine tells her followers that a sea goddess “will prepare halls from coral and glass and the bones of whales. . . . Down there, you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.”71 In fact, however, Angevine lives in terror of the force beneath the waves, which marked her when she drowned as a child, leaving sucker scars all over her body, ultimately drawing her down for permanent torment.72
The characters yearning to be changed do not usually articulate their reasons, the prose offering only a sense of the numinous as an explanatory force: awe, a longing for annihilation, despair, wonder. The journalist narrator of “Houses under the Sea” pines for his lost lover, Angevine, the leader of the suicide cult, and he’s simultaneously revolted by and drawn to what the cult venerates. When he sees the statue at their altar, he is nauseated by “that corrupt and bloated Madonna of the abyss, its tentacles and anemone tendrils and black, bulging squid eyes, the tubeworm proboscis snaking from one of the holes where its face should have been.”73 Yet, at the same time, he does crave another monstrous, marine-changed body: Angevine’s, scarred by countless suckers and ultimately transformed to resemble a deep-sea creature. On a videotape recorded by a submersible, the narrator sees
Jacova Angevine, her face at the bottom of the sea, turned up towards the surface, towards the sky and Heaven beyond the weight of all that black, black water. . . .
She opens her eyes and they are not her eyes, but the eyes of some marine creature adapted to that perpetual night . . . eyes like matching pools of ink, and something darts from her parted lips.74
He dreams of Angevine and yearns to join her. “[She] takes me down, down, down, like the lifeless body of a child caught in an undertow. And I’d go with her, like a flash I’d go.”75
Faced with stone, sea, and the strange organisms within them, Kiernan’s characters are baffled and disgusted but also compelled, unable to look away or leave, and in some cases unable to resist surrendering to transformation offered by the more-than-human. Indeed, Fisher suggests that this is the core quality that differentiates weird from horror: “the weird cannot only repel, it must also compel our attention.”76 In Kiernan’s “The Water Works,” for example, the geologist is shown a coiling, chitinous organism discovered deep in rock strata:
“Ugly little bastard, ain’t he?” the foreman says, and spits again. “But you ain’t never seen nothing like it before, have you?” And Henry shakes his head, no, never, and now he wants to look away, doesn’t like the way the thing in the bottle is making him feel, but it’s stretched itself out again and he can see tiny fibers like hairs or minute spines protruding from between the segments.77
The insectile thing revolts him but also calls to him—he wants to look away, “but it’s stretched itself out again and he can see the tiny fibers.” His intention to refuse, to look away, to not feel, is thwarted by the thing moving, stretching, in ways that compel him. Another creature found in stone elicits a similar response in the sequel novel Threshold (2001), which explores this same site generations later. Chance Matthews is a student paleontologist, trained by her grandmother, and is confident in her ability to read the signs of “lost and ancient seas . . . as plainly as the books on the library’s shelves.”78 She tries to classify and date a trilobite fossil she finds among her grandmother’s possessions but realizes it is unclassified, “tens of millions of years” older than any other record of such a creature.79 “‘What are you?’ she asks the rock, as if it might answer.”80 The fossil is not only mysterious but aggressively uncanny:
Unpleasant light, Chance thinks. An unclean, slippery sort of light, and she scolds herself for letting all the weirdness get to her. . . . But then the rock seems to wink at her again, briefest flash of greasy light, and there’s something else, the realization that it’s difficult to look directly at the septahedral plate for very long, that it seems to force her eyes away after only a few seconds.81
The stone simultaneously resists her scrutiny, evokes an intense visceral response, and compels her.
Kiernan’s work consistently presents stone as an agent: alive, deliberate, and acting on human animals. “The Water Works,” for example, opens by describing the Red Mountain, “weathered tip end of Appalachia’s long and scabby spine,” the “limestone and iron ore bones” whittled away and exposed, and rain “turn[ing] the ground to sea slime again, primordial more the color of a butchery.”82 The animalistic description implies that the stone is alive and flayed (although, to be sure, the life of stone can also certainly be described in nonanimal ways). Even more important, stones affect people, and choose to do so. In her poem “Marrow” (1981), Ursula Le Guin describes how, when she stops trying to masterfully pry meaning from a stone, the stone speaks to her: “and the marrow of my bones / heard, and replied.”83 Stones in Kiernan’s writing are even more assertive, acting on human bodies and minds. The first-person narrator of “Far from Any Shore” is a female paleontologist suffering a breakdown after an experience at an excavation. She unearths a stone that causes “an icy, thrumming tingle that resonates through the flesh and bones of my hand and then moves gradually up my arm.”84 The stone is “a contagion—organic, mnemonic, visual, tactile, older even than the strata of blue-grey shale and yellow chalky limestone . . . something infinitely communicable that has slept since the stone that entombed the beautiful petrified skeletons of our Selmasaurus and Pteranodon was only carbonaceous grit and clayey slime.”85 The infection takes her two colleagues and torments them until their bodies are “gnawed and twisted and refashioned,” and the narrator describes hearing the soft, wet, hungry sounds of something developing in the hotel bathroom, born and enabled through the changes of her colleagues’ bodies: “the soft body of something without a spine or even any definite form.”86
The vector for these changes is bacterial infection. Bacteria are ancient forces that predate and will outlast us, inhabiting all time scales, including the lithic. For this reason, Cohen suggests that bacteria are maybe “visible” to the lithic in a way that fleeting individual human bodies are not: “life can hold perdurability only if the bacterial and the human are one: then you are nearer to stone’s speed, then stone can see you.”87 The scale of bacterial temporalities is reflected in further coinages of -cene, such as the “cyanocene” extending from 2.4 billion years ago to the present day, inaugurated by cyanobacteria that could photosynthesize, producing the oxygen that caused the first mass extinction event, and the “Wolbachiacene,” a term playfully coined by Eben Kirksey to convey the longevity and influence of Wolbachia bacteria in invertebrates for the past 150 million years.88 Similarly, there is no clear boundary between the human and the bacterial: “the” human is partly bacterial, depending on a bacterial microbiome for everything from digestion to neurological function to immune defenses.89 “The” human is an assemblage including the microbiome. Kiernan’s writing regularly explores a bacterial erotics of transformation, treating human tissue and biomes as material for change.
The short story “Metamorphosis A” (2006) describes a society devastated by a contagion unleashed by rock extraction, “gold mines in South Africa and Siberia, the biology of extremophiles, endoliths and cryptoendoliths, contaminated core samples, virulence, infectivity.”90 Infected people are stung, their flesh turning necrotic, then become a quivering, faceless mass. Yet some people actively seek out the contagion. The narrator’s female companion, among others, chooses to descend below the city to become infected, and he thinks of her “offering . . . furtive prayers . . . to ancient bacterial gods for the grace of this change . . . to shed your unwanted and unyielding humanity.”91 The narrator is appalled at her change after she makes that choice, her face destroyed, but thinks, “At least I do not have to look into your blue eyes and see whatever might have been there at the end, whatever pain or loss or regret, whatever confusion or terror. Worse yet, what ecstasy or relief.”92 He cannot bear to watch the process as it occurs but sits beside her bed and listens to the painful change of slow degeneration (in his view) or blessed transformation (in hers).93
Such scenes can be analyzed in terms of a single human’s desire for annihilation, or as masochistic fantasy along the lines of Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty,” and indeed several elements of the scene underline that reading (ceremony, suspense, and submission to a powerful force).94 Here, however, I wish to focus on the story’s preoccupation with more-than-human reproductivity. When the narrator of “Metamorphosis A” musters the courage to look at his partner’s transformation, he sees
a chrysalis. . . . Spines sprout from that more substantial mess curled fetal on the bed and sunk partway into the sheets and mattress. It pulsates faintly, gently, because of course you still need air. . . . There’s an iridescent, peacock-blue cleft where your vagina used to be. . . . Your face is gone, obliterated by these relentless alterations.95
His partner has chosen to become a generative substratum for incomprehensible, ravenous microbial change, “countless generations . . . born and nurtured deep within the hive of you.”96 In reality, bacteria in the vaginal microbiome are transmitted through passage through the birth canal, and studies indicate that this microbiome benefits infant gut bioflora.97 In this short story, that vaginal bacterial substratum has become a particularly distinctive component of a devastating, triumphant bacterial flourishing.
A similar transformation occurs in the short story “Galapagos” (2009). Set in 2037, the story is a written record by a first-person woman narrator, Merrick, sent to ascertain what happened on a spaceship after the commander broadcast a message implying a collective intention to commit suicide. Merrick’s lesbian lover Amery was on board, and when Merrick reaches the ship, Amery addresses her across the comms system. Merrick walks through the corridors as Amery commands, noticing the walls thick hung with indescribable organic masses, while Amery speaks across the comms with “soft elation,” saying, “We have ten million children. Soon, we will have ten million more.”98 Merrick turns the corner and
I see her, then. All that’s left of her, or all that she’s become. The rough outline of her body, squatting near one of the lower bunks. Her damp skin shimmers . . . pocked with countless oozing pores or lesions. . . . There is constant, eager movement from inside her distended breasts and belly. And where the cleft of her sex once was, I don’t have the language to describe what I saw there. But she bleeds life from that impossible wound.99
Merrick realizes that Amery chose to be unrecognizably changed in the process of becoming a substratum for alien bacterial life. The title of the story, evoking Darwin’s writing, implies the emergence of new species.
At first glance, such stories by Kiernan might seem to describe the erasure of human in the service of something other, but of course the bacterial microbiome and human tissue that enable these changes are “the” human—despite the deceptive definite article, “the” human is always an assemblage. Angevine’s body becomes substrate for marine changes, the academic of the “Cryomancer’s Daughter” becomes petrified, the academics in “Far from Any Shore” become revelatory new life-forms, and the women of “Galapagos” and “Metamorphosis A” become hives of bacterial transformation: all these bodies become the start of something new, but that new thing has human tissue and microbiome as part of its origin. Haraway insists that nothing about the Chthulucene has to be about “wiping out what has come before”; rather, it can be “full of inheritances, of remembering, and full of comings, of nurturing what might still be.”100 Kiernan’s Chthulucene in a minor key offers a variation on this: a future of traces, remnants, and hauntings.
In what sense can such encounters be seen as hopeful? I will suggest several answers. Degradation is central to both the beauty and the horror of Kiernan’s transformations. The bodies of these human animals become less human, their corporeal integrity, dignity, even recognizability, changed into something both more appalling and more fruitful.101 To refer back to the Deleuzian concept of assemblage, the transformed bodies ensuing from such encounters can be understood as transformed assemblages, and these transformations can be understood in terms of “lines of flight” and new “ways of becoming.” Whitney Bauman, for example, says, “Taking a cue from queer theory . . . I want to listen to the ‘abjections’ (or left-overs, remainders) that have built up around the planet in response to attempts at mastery and control. It is in listening to these abjections that new possibilities for planetary becoming might emerge.”102 These disintegrations imagine new becomings, equivocal and contingent positions that rightly undermine human illusions of authority and corporeal integrity.
While Kiernan’s work is in somber, incantatory, and sublime register, it nonetheless overlaps in several ways with the postapocalyptic bacterial bacchanalia imagined and celebrated by Kirksey. He describes how Wolbachia bacteria affect their hosts, changing their gender, sterilizing, or selectively killing embryos, and even causing new species to emerge, and Kirksey suggests that they offer a way to imagine nonanthropocentric futurity: “rather than continue to bemoan the loss of critical functions (as emergent ecological communities flourish around us), it is time to more fully appreciate the possibilities of love in the Wolbachiacene.”103 Kirksey’s discourse is exuberant, while Kiernan’s is awe-full, but both make us notice a generativity that exceeds us.
Kiernan’s work dramatizes how the weird is not only about uncertainty, disorientation, and disgust but also about desire and a yearning to be altered—perhaps annihilated, certainly changed. Kiernan’s work engages longing for such change without sanitizing it as either apotheosis or horizontal fellowship and mutuality: annihilation and violation are also part of the necessary story. She pushes us to find language for a complex mesh of affects that can augment our sense of weird challenges to anthropocentrism, beyond defeat of reason or disgust at grotesquerie. Other kinds of desire and hunger are at play in the field of more-than-human encounter, other weirds to add to our repertoire of arts of noticing, even for a Chthulucene in a minor key. Shudder, slither, and strangeness are not always salvation. They are more interesting than that.
Notes
For “arts of noticing,” see Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. Subsequent references in parentheses.
I discuss the analogy of the “minor key” in more detail in Sara Wasson, “Spectrality, Strangeness and Stigmaphilia: Gothic and Critical Disability Studies,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability, ed. Alice Hall, 70–81 (London: Routledge, 2020).
Susan Leigh Star, personal communication, cited in Eben Kirksey, Craig Schuetze, and Stefan Helmreich, “Introduction: Tactics of Multispecies Ethnography,” in The Multispecies Salon, ed. Eben Kirksey (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 3.
Alisdair Rogers, Noel Castree, and Rob Kitchin, A Dictionary of Human Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), s.v. “more-than-human.”
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 21–22.
Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, eds., Introduction to The Weird (London: Corvus, 2011), xv; Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), Kindle edition.
China Miéville, “AfterWeird,” in VanderMeer and VanderMeer, The Weird, 1115.
VanderMeer and VanderMeer, Introduction, xv–xx.
VanderMeer and VanderMeer, xix.
Kiernan’s paleontological writing includes C. R. Kiernan and D. R. Schwimmer, “First Record of a Velociraptorine Theropod (Tetanurae, Dromaeosauridae) from the Eastern Gulf Coastal United States,” The Mosasaur 7 (2004): 89–93; Caitlín R. Kiernan, “Stratigraphic Distribution and Habitat Segregation of Mosasaurs in the Upper Cretaceous of Western and Central Alabama,” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 22, no. 1 (2002): 91–103; D. R. Schwimmer and Caitlín R. Kiernan, “Eastern Late Cretaceous Theropods in North America and the Crossing of the Interior Seaway,” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 21, no. 3 (2001): 99A; Caitlín R. Kiernan, “Clidastes Cope, 1868 (Reptilia, Sauria),” Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature 49 (1992): 137–39.
Jeff VanderMeer, “Interview: Caitlín R. Kiernan on Weird Fiction,” March 12, 2012, http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/03/interview-Caitlín-r-kiernan-on-weird-fiction, para. 10.
James Goho, “The Figure of the Gothic Body in the Fiction of Caitlín R. Kiernan,” Studies in the Fantastic 5 (2017): 78–98; Timothy Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-in-Itself,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017): 1133–48.
Goho, “Figure,” 81.
Erin Stocks, “Author Spotlight: Caitlín R. Kiernan,” Lightspeed, November 6, 2010, http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-Caitlín-r-kiernan/, para. 6.
H. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936), http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/soi.aspx, para. 247.
S. T. Joshi, Introduction to Caitlín R. Kiernan, Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (Burton, Mich.: Subterranean Press, 2015), 13, 15.
Jeff VanderMeer, “Making Her Own Light,” in Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Ammonite Violin (Hornsea, U.K.: PS, 2018), vii–x.
Joshi, Introduction, 14.
Caitlín R. Kiernan, “The Beginning of the Year without a Summer,” in The Dinosaur Tourist, 9–24 (Burton, Mich.: Subterranean Press, 2018); Kiernan, “The Voyeur in the House of Glass,” in Ammonite Violin, 149–64.
Caitlín R. Kiernan, “The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean,” in Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea, 285–98.
Goho, “Figure,” 92; Caitlín R. Kiernan, “The Ammonite Violin,” in Ammonite Violin, 85–104; Kiernan, “A Season of Broken Dolls,” in Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea, 111–26.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1; Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 208.
Gilles Deleuze and D. Lapoujade, Two Regimes of Madness (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 177.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (New York: Continuum, 1987), 4.
Geoffrey Harman, “A Well Wrought Broken Hammer,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 191; Morton, Hyperobjects, 20; Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things,” in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 229; Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Tangled Matters,” in Entangled Worlds, ed. Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, 1–18 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
Anatoli Ignatov, “Practices of Eco-Sensation,” Theory and Event 14, no. 2 (2011), https://muse-jhu-edu.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/article/440480, para. 8.
G. Ceballos, P. R. Ehrlich, A. D. Barnosky, A. García, R. M. Pringle, and T. M. Palmer, “Accelerated Modern Human-Induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction,” Science Advances 1, no. 5 (2015): 1–5.
Simon Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 2 (2009): 203–25.
Claire Quigley, “The Weird in Fantastika,” Fantastika 1, no. 1 (2017): 4–5.
Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Heather Anne Swanson, “Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), G3.
Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 20–27.
Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (New York: Zero, 2011).
Thomas Friedman, “Global Weirding Is Here,” New York Times, February 17, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/opinion/17friedman.html; Gerry Canavan and Andrew Hageman, “Array,” Paradoxa 28 (2016), https://paradoxa.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/1-Intro-Global-Weirding-Canavan-Hageman-pp-7-14.pdf; Morton, Dark Ecology.
Fisher, Weird.
Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.
Caitlín R. Kiernan, “Houses under the Sea,” 2003, Nightmare Magazine, May 8, 2013, http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/houses-under-the-sea/; Kiernan, “Far from Any Shore,” in Dinosaur Tourist, 25–40. Subsequent references are in parentheses.
VanderMeer, “Interview,” para. 14, emphasis in original.
Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, Calif.: PM Press, 2016), 1–12.
Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia (Melbourne: Re.press, 2008), 17.
Moore, “Anthropocene or Capitalocene?,” 5.
Caitlín R. Kiernan, “In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888),” in Trilobite (Burton, Mich.: Subterranean Press, 2003), 69. Subsequent references are in parentheses.
Philip Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23, 113.
Census of Marine Life, http://www.coml.org/; Claire Nouvian, The Deep (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Stacy Alaimo, “Violet-Black,” in Prismatic Ecology, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 233–51 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Alaimo, “Violet-Black,” 241.
Kiernan, “Houses under the Sea,” paras. 77, 79.
Caitlín R. Kiernan, “Bridle,” in Ammonite Violin, 26.
Kiernan, “Houses under the Sea,” para. 8.
Swanson et al., “Bodies,” M1–M2.
Donna Haraway, “Symbiogenesis, Sympoesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble,” in Tsing et al., Arts of Living, M33.
Haraway, Staying, 101.
Eileen Crist, “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature,” in Moore, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, 18.
Fred Botting, Gothic, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), 12; VanderMeer and VanderMeer, Introduction, xviii.
David Punter, Gothic Pathologies (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 14; Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), xv.
Catherine Spooner, Postmillennial Gothic (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Tim Jones, The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2015).
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, “A Genealogy of Queer Ecologies,” in Queer Ecologies, ed. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 1–47 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (2010): 277.
Edelman, No Future, 8–9, 2–3.
Edelman, 8, 17.
Haraway, Staying, 2, 76.
Haraway, 102.
VanderMeer, “Interview,” para. 10.
VanderMeer, para. 22.
Kiernan, “Houses under the Sea,” para. 145.
Kiernan, “Far from Any Shore,” 26–27.
Kiernan, 37–38.
Kiernan, “Bridle,” 26.
Caitlín R. Kiernan, “The Cryomancer’s Daughter,” in Ammonite Violin, 61.
Caitlín R. Kiernan, “The Hole with the Girl in Its Heart” (2005–7), in Ammonite Violin, 183–90.
Kiernan, “Houses under the Sea,” para. 16.
Kiernan, para. 167.
Kiernan, para. 164.
Kiernan, paras. 185, 189.
Kiernan, para. 229, emphasis in original.
Fisher, Weird.
Kiernan, “Water Works,” 66.
Caitlín R. Kiernan, Threshold (New York: Penguin, 2007), loc. 476, Kindle edition.
Kiernan, loc. 2345.
Kiernan, loc. 2356.
Kiernan, loc. 2774–76.
Kiernan, “Water Works,” 61.
Ursula Le Guin, “The Marrow,” in Tsing et al., Arts of Living, M17.
Kiernan, “Far from Any Shore,” 25.
Kiernan, 37.
Kiernan, 38–39.
Cohen, Stone, 30.
Dorion Sagan, “Coda. Beautiful Monsters: Terra in the Cyanocene,” in Tsing et al., Arts of Living, M169–74 (p. 169); Eben Kirksey, “Queer Love, Gender Bending Bacteria, and Life after the Anthropocene,” Theory, Culture, and Society 36, no. 6 (2019): 203.
Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” Quarterly Review of Biology 8, no. 4 (2012): 325–41; Scott Gilbert, “Holobiont by Birth,” in Tsing et al., Arts of Living, M73–M90.
Caitlín R. Kiernan, “Metamorphosis A,” in Ammonite Violin, 128.
Kiernan, 133.
Kiernan, 132–33.
Kiernan, 131.
Deleuze argues that masochism involves a tableau of two frozen figures, straining toward each other with consummation relentlessly deferred: “Waiting and suspense are essential characteristics of the masochistic experience. . . . Formally speaking, masochism is a state of waiting.” Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism (1967; repr., New York: Zone, 1991), 33, 71.
Kiernan, “Metamorphosis A,” 132–33.
Kiernan, 131.
Josef Neu, “Developmental Aspects of Maternal-Fetal, and Infant Gut Microbiota and Implications for Long-Term Health,” Maternal Health, Neonatology, and Perinatology 1 (2015): 6.
Caitlín R. Kiernan, “Galapagos,” in Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea, 226–27, 236–37.
Kiernan, 237.
Haraway, Staying, 2, 76.
Matthew Calarco, “Identity, Difference, Indistinction,” New Centennial Review 11, no. 2 (2011): 56.
Whitney Bauman, “Climate Weirding and Queering Nature,” Religions 6, no. 2 (2015): 748; James Morgart, “Deleuzions of Ecohorror,” Horror Studies 8, no. 1 (2017): 115–30.
Kirksey, “Queer Love,” 213.
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