Revising Nonhuman Ethics in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

Nonhuman

Annihilation’s narrator, the biologist, does not invite identification. She dislikes learning anything personal about her colleagues: “I didn’t want their voices in my head, their ideas of me, nor their own stories or problems” (31). Yet despite her standoffishness, she at one point tells a story about her research with which any academic might sympathize. Years before joining the Southern Reach, the government organization investigating Area X, the biologist learns that she will lose funding for a project on which she has worked for months, and thus her job. In response, she jumps in her truck to visit the tidal pools she has been studying (172–73). The pools reward her devotion with a glimpse of “a rare species of colossal starfish” nicknamed “destroyer of worlds” by the scientific community (174). This starfish precipitates in the biologist an intellectual crisis: [T]he longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all—about nature, about ecosystems. There was something about my mood and its dark glow that eclipsed sense, that made me see this creature, which had indeed been assigned a place in the taxonomy—catalogued, studied, and described—irreducible down to any of that. And if I kept looking, I knew that ultimately I would have to admit I knew less than nothing about myself as well, whether that was a lie or the truth.(175)

What disorientation! Unlike Socrates, who at least knew he knew nothing, the biologist cannot even be sure whether her admission of total ignorance is “a lie or the truth.” Already sucker punched by money woes, she finds herself doubting the “taxonomy” on the authority of which her knowledge relies. The “irreducible” element that scholarship cannot capture renders scholarship itself vulnerable to radical skepticism. Even tenured faculty might weep. Yet, practically speaking, one cannot remain suspended in the skeptical void. In Area X, the biologist encounters a composite human-alien being and has “a similar experience” to her confrontation with the starfish “at a thousand times the magnitude” (175). She accepts the “revelation and paralysis” that the ineffable produces in her but decides that, in the face of the ineffable, one’s options are “[e]ither death or a slow and certain thawing” (179).

It should not surprise us that an encounter with a rare starfish becomes, for the biologist, a confrontation with epistemological skepticism. Many prominent theorists of the nonhuman have argued that animals, objects, and other nonhumans have an overlooked power to disrupt human certainty. Often, these scholars celebrate such disruptions for curbing anthropocentric arrogance.³ Nevertheless, the radical doubt that follows poses a knotty problem for nonhuman theory’s environmental ethics: how can a system of thought so committed to self-doubt convince others to adopt its ethical prescriptions?

One might ask: Why do nonhuman theory’s ethical prescriptions matter, especially in relation to literature? After all, the ethical perspective is far from dominant in literary theory or criticism. Almost two decades ago, Lawrence Buell declared, “Ethics has gained new resonance in literary studies,” but that resonance has yet to become a dominant frequency (7). The literary-critical reservations about ethics that Buell observed in 1999—unfamiliarity with moral philosophy as an academic field, suspicion of normative judgment, and worry that ethical analytic frames were apolitical—have kept ethics’ influence on literary theory and criticism relatively mild.

Yet ecocriticism and its conspecifics, including nonhuman theory, are something of an exception to this rule. Many influential ecocritics of the past decade explicitly discuss ethical theory and praxis in their work. Ursula K. Heise has treated at length the question of “whether localism is indeed a necessary component of environmental ethics”; upon answering in the negative, she has argued for an ethical eco-cosmopolitanism (9). Rob Nixon has posited continuity between writing and environmental activism in the postcolonial sphere, while suggesting that novels represent environmentally based ethical critiques best through aesthetic indirection, for example symbol and metaphor (52). Heather Houser has explored how narrative affect may “variously aid or inhibit ethical involvement” in ecological issues (7). In addition to these ecocritics’ book-length projects, a number of recent articles have considered ethics in relation to such topics as environmentalism, thing theory, animal studies, and posthumanism.⁴

Even if ecocritics and theorists of the nonhuman adopt the language of ethics, are we justified in analyzing theorists’ arguments according to their apparent ethical persuasiveness? I claim we are, because leading theorists of the nonhuman have themselves suggested that their arguments ought to instill particular ethical attitudes and practices in their readers. Jane Bennett has written that accepting her vital-materialist position entails a “greater ethical appreciation of thing-power,” which may motivate some meaningful “ecological project of sustainability” (349). Timothy Morton claims that we should found “[a]ny ethical or political decision” we make on “directives coming from entities” (183), directives that might lead us to pursue an “ethical sublime” embodied in green technology (105). Cary Wolfe argues for recognition of “the nonhuman animal . . . as an irreducibly different and unique form of subjectivity” (140–41) and “an ethics based not on ability, activity, agency, and empowerment but on a compassion that is rooted in our vulnerability and passivity” (141). These quotations demonstrate that leading theorists of the nonhuman do intend, or at least hope, to affect readers’ ethical praxis.

Yet these scholars undercut their persuasiveness with performances of radical doubt, weakness, or self-contradiction. Bennett calls her own theory “presumptuous” in its representation of the nonhuman (349). Morton claims that in our modern condition “choice is not the protocol of moral action,” an ambiguous statement that seemingly denies subjects’ ethical agency and thus contradicts his intimation that the “visibility of choice” is what renders green technologies such as wind farms ethically sublime (181, 105). Wolfe admits that attention to the irreducible, central to the Derridean ethics he propounds, might lead to moral indifference and inaction. The indifference would come from “the security of [the] knowledge that there is no such thing as a good conscience,” and the inaction from a powerlessness to “generalize on behalf of more progressive policies” to protect nonhuman animals (96, 98). The intentional self-contradictions and self-undermining statements hedging these ethical arguments by theorists of the nonhuman express the humility they wish to inculcate in humanity for environmental purposes. To borrow the biologist’s language, however, humility leads their arguments toward death in the skeptical void as often as toward thaw.

I do not detail these problems in nonhuman theory to dismiss the scholars I have discussed, whose work I find productive and illuminating. I am simply trying to articulate why nonhuman theory might fail to motivate the ethical behaviors it explicitly encourages. In modeling the radical doubt and humility that a confrontation with the nonhuman can occasion, it purposefully weakens and confuses arguments intended to promote controversial ethical values. Given the short-term benefits that many humans derive from unethical environmental practices, purposefully weak arguments seem unlikely to persuade. I now turn to a discussion of sciencefiction criticism to suggest how the genre might model a more successful kind of persuasion.

Science Fiction

It has long been a truism of science-fiction criticism that the genre is well suited to representing the nonhuman and the world of objects. This truism implies that science fiction is a privileged mode for making manifest to readers what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” assemblies of objects or phenomena whose diffusion in time or space makes them difficult to grasp—such as, for example, climate change. Recently, novelist and intellectual Amitav Ghosh published a monograph, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), in which he repeatedly notes that science fiction is better equipped than realism to depict climate change. Nevertheless, he ultimately concludes that because science-fictional representations of climate change are non-realist, they are unethical. In the section that follows, I use Great Derangement as a jumping-off point to discuss both why conventional realism fails to represent climate change satisfactorily and why science fiction can, in fact, succeed in doing so without violating ethical boundaries.

In Great Derangement, Ghosh argues that contemporary realist fiction, which he sometimes calls “serious fiction,” has so bound itself to probable events, human timescales, and psychological character-portraits that it cannot represent some of the most relevant agents in environmental change (24): nonhuman “forces of unthinkable magnitude that create unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space” (63). It is important to repeat, here, that conventional realism’s avoidance of superstorms, unlikely atmospheric events, and so forth springs not from these events’ unreality but only their rarity, given conventional realism’s aesthetic commitment to “the concealment of those exceptional moments that serve as the motor of narrative”—or, in other words, its commitment to camouflaging plot and foregrounding psychology (17). As Ghosh repeatedly notes, science fiction and the other genres against which contemporary literature defines itself have no such problems (24, 26, 65, 71). The future event, the rare occurrence, and the nonhuman agent (mutant, alien, or otherwise) are at home in science fiction, as is the clearly structured, overarching plot propelled by what scholar Howard V. Hendrix calls “the explanatory mode of science” evident in nonfiction narratives like global climate change projections (140).⁵

Ghosh nevertheless cautions against non-realist genres’ representing global warming and related phenomena. He warns that “ethical difficulties . . . might arise in treating them as magical or metaphorical,” and that “to treat them as magical and surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling—which is that they are actually happening” (27). There are two problems with Ghosh’s warnings here, one having to do with the nature of metaphor, the other with science fiction’s relationship to the real. First, both warnings ignore the distinction between treating a phenomenon as a metaphor and representing it through metaphor. If Annihilation used environmental degradation as a mere vehicle to describe, for example, the biologist’s childhood, it would demonstrate unethical narrative priorities. But using a science-fiction environment, Area X, as a vehicle to represent more clearly certain features of environmental degradation is a different matter altogether. In the latter case, environmental degradation has narrative priority and is treated with ethical seriousness.

Second, as classic and current scholars have long contended, science fiction can and often does represent phenomena that are “actually happening”; its aesthetic strategies for doing so are simply different from those of conventional realism. Darko Suvin’s famous definition of science fiction, “the literature of cognitive estrangement,” claims that the genre distances itself from the world “as a means of understanding the tendencies latent in reality” (4, 8). Nearly as famous is Fredric Jameson’s argument that utopian science fiction gives us a perspective from which to imagine “the systemic nature of the social totality” invisible from our position within it (xii). In 1995, academic and novelist Damien Broderick drew on a heterogeneous scholarly tradition to argue that science fiction can express, through “ontological saturation or intensity” of description, possible futures in realist terms (34). More recently, Seo-Young Chu has proposed that science fiction is realism, albeit of a peculiar kind. Rather than supposing that science fiction “operates beyond mimesis,” she describes it “as a mimetic discourse whose objects of representation are nonimaginary yet cognitively estranging” (3).⁶

One can see how these scholars’ definitions of science fiction operate by applying them to Annihilation. Following Suvin and Jameson, we might say that by locating us imaginatively in a weird, alien space, Annihilation estranges us from consensus reality and thereby allows us to see it more fully. Following Broderick, Annihilation represents the unreal landscape of Area X using intensely realistic language. Because the text’s narrative investment and implied meaning lie as much in Area X’s landscape as in its characters, Annihilation is of “a narrative kind which importantly foregrounds its schemata, maps that serve as territories”—a literature of the nonhuman world (Broderick 46). Following Chu, Area X “transcends the literal/figurative dichotomy” (15); though not itself a real place, Area X makes “available for representation” such “cognitively estranging referents” as global ecosystems, nonhuman consciousnesses, and hyperobjects more generally (47). Chu retains Broderick’s point about science fiction’s detailed—even realistic—prose style, but she contends that what these descriptions present to the reader are not unreal but abstract, eccentric, or sensually unavailable phenomena.

It may be that not every work of science fiction has the relationship to reality described by Chu, Suvin, or Jameson, but Ghosh errs in assuming that because science fiction does not represent our here and now directly, it fails to represent them at all. Instead, science fiction can represent reality slantwise, sidestepping realism’s contentious particulars and epistemological demands while taking on the unlikely, greater-than-human phenomena that conventional realism refuses to represent but that increasingly order our reality.

A Hike into Area X

It is a bit perverse, perhaps, to claim that Annihilation functions as ethical persuasion toward more environmentally conscious values and behaviors. The literary tradition of weird science fiction, to which the Southern Reach trilogy belongs, arguably coalesced around the work of H. P. Lovecraft, who conceived of the genre as nihilistic in both moral and global terms (Joshi xi). Nevertheless, VanderMeer has encouraged an ethical reading of the Southern Reach trilogy by naming radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen a major influence on the books.⁷ Jensen has argued that it is “inexcusable and immoral” to claim “literature should be apolitical” (8). Instead, writers should “help to create a literature of morality and resistance” to the exploitation of nature and extinction of species (10). Annihilation is, in Jensen’s terms, an ethical work: it assumes biodiversity’s inherent value and, from that assumption, imagines a model for sustainable human-nonhuman communities that respect both the autonomy and the relational subjectivity of their members.

Political theorist Cheryl Hall has argued that because “living more sustainably will unavoidably entail both sacrifice and reward,” any wholly upbeat narrative about the systemic cultural changes necessary to avoid environmental disaster will be obviously, off-puttingly disingenuous: “too shallow” to be persuasive (136). To convince the necessary majority of people to enact these changes, we must disseminate a narrative of “improvement, because there must be something of greater value to inspire the sacrifice,” but in the short term— that is, in the lifespans of those who make the initial change—the improvement in question may well be moral rather than material (137). We need an environmental narrative that persuades people to accept a value system according to which environmentally ethical living is worth more to us than the short-term advantages and comforts that unethical environmental practices offer.

Annihilation communicates biodiversity’s inherent value implicitly, through the intense yet disinterested attention the biologist pays to the abundant life in Area X.⁸ As ethicist Angela M. Smith notes, “if one judges some thing or person to be important or significant in some way, this should (rationally) have an influence on one’s tendency to notice factors which pertain to the existence, welfare, or flourishing of that thing or person” (244). The biologist constantly notices nonhuman life but seems to assign no instrumental value to it, as is evident in her tendency to give long nature descriptions unnecessary to her narrative of the expedition: In few other places could you still find habitat where, within the space of walking only six or seven miles, you went from forest to swamp to salt marsh to beach. In Area X, I had been told, I would find marine life that had adjusted to the brackish freshwater and which at low tide swam far up the natural canals formed by the reeds, sharing the same environment with otters and deer. If you walked along the beach, riddled through with the holes of fiddler crabs, you would sometimes look out to see one of the giant reptiles, for they, too, had adapted to their habitat.(12)

The biologist notices the complexity of ecosystems present in Area X, in contrast to the overdeveloped homogeneity of human civilization beyond its border. The omission of commas between prepositional phrases in the clause “you went from forest to swamp to salt marsh to beach” evokes the density of biodiversity in the landscape. The decision not to modify these bare nouns with adjectives—the exception, “salt marsh,” usefully distinguishes the habitat in question from freshwater marshes—communicates their inherent value, distinct from the sensual pleasure the second-person singular “you” might derive from a dense, emerald forest, a lush and verdant swamp, or a beach with golden sand and turquoise water. A similar dearth of adjectives characterizes the animals in the passage. In sum, the narration declines to make a sensual argument for the value of biodiversity. The justification for the biologist’s attention to diverse nonhuman organisms resides in their intrinsic value, not in the pleasures humans can derive from them.

The biologist’s bare style diverges sharply from the genre tradition on which Annihilation draws. In weird fiction, generally speaking, “lush purple prose . . . is part of the fabric of the story” (Miéville). This prose is characteristic of both Lovecraft and his descendants. Take Thomas Ligotti, a weird-fiction author whom VanderMeer has called “one of our greatest dark imaginations” (Foreword xiv). In Ligotti’s work one finds phrases such as “palaces of soft and sullen colors standing beside seas of scintillating pattern and beneath sadly radiant patches of sky” (120). The bare, concrete nouns of the biologist’s prose become, in Ligotti’s stories, exotic (“palaces”), personified (“sullen colors”), or abstract (“pattern” and “patches”); sonic play, primarily alliteration, also becomes more obtrusive. As China Miéville has argued, the cognitive and aesthetic estrangement this lush prose creates is often integral to fiction in the weird tradition. The partial disjunct between Annihilation’s genre and its reserved nature descriptions suggests all the more strongly the intrinsic value the novel accords to its nonhuman referents.

The biologist’s prose hews more closely to the weird paradigm when describing organisms apparently unique to Area X, however. When it escapes human knowledge, biodiversity compels both recognition of value and uncanny horror. After the biologist’s expedition discovers an underground structure not present on their maps of Area X, they decide to explore. On the structure’s walls, they find writing, in English, apparently religious in nature, made of living organisms the biologist cannot immediately identify. This disquieting discovery pulls the biologist’s prose toward the lush: [T]he letters, connected by their cursive script, were made from what would have looked to the layperson like rich green fernlike moss but in fact was probably a type of fungi or other eukaryotic organism. The curling filaments were all packed very close together and rising out from the wall. A loamy smell came from the words along with an underlying hint of rotting honey. This miniature forest swayed, almost imperceptibly, like sea grass in a gentle ocean current.(24)

Here we find an uptick in adjectives, metaphors, and similes, sometimes piled one upon the other, as when the organism looks like fernlike moss. The simile of the “sea grass” hints at the personifying uncanny. It reminds us that plant movement usually has an external cause, such as an “ocean current,” but fails to provide a cause; we are left to wonder about the extent of this strange growth’s ability to move—and, more disturbingly, to choose to move. Exploring the structure further, the biologist calls it an “ongoing horror show of such beauty and biodiversity that I could not fully take it all in,” a description that makes explicit the relationship between horror, biodiversity, and human epistemological disorientation (43).

Area X’s uncanniness saves Annihilation from the rhetorical mistake of aggressive optimism, the same mistake Cheryl Hall attributes to those environmentalists who suggest that resistance to green ethics only arises “from false consciousness about what is truly valuable in life” (136). Annihilation evokes the disorientation and fear that might attend humanity’s acceptance of nonhuman life’s value and, in consequence, the admission that human life is not uniquely valuable. Yet the novel simultaneously recognizes these nonhuman sources of fear as ethical subjects. With this intermingling of horror, confusion, and human-nonhuman affinity, Annihilation makes a weird, persuasive case for biodiversity’s value.

This Is Plant Country!

The horror of Area X’s personified biodiversity requires some explanation. One could argue that the horror arises from Area X’s science-fictional attributes, which do not translate to our reality. Even if one accepts that nonhuman matter possesses agency or consciousness, one might take that acceptance as an opportunity for a “playful, naive stance toward nonhuman things,” as Jane Bennett does (366). I would argue, however, that Annihilation stages the potential horror of an animated, biologically diverse, and non-anthropocentric world as applicable to our reality as well as to Area X. The horror springs from a sense that an animated nonhuman world would compromise human autonomy and value. As Amitav Ghosh puts it, realizing “that we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who share elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctively our own” is overwhelmingly “uncanny,” much as Area X is uncanny (30–31, 30). Annihilation stages this fear of compromised autonomy by hinting that Area X manipulates expedition members’ bodies and minds, and it justifies the subordination of human relationships by depicting the biologist’s love for wild nature as a kind of extramarital affair that contributed to the breakdown of her marriage.

Much popular resistance to accepting environmentalist values seems to spring from a fear of restricted autonomy, demonstrated by “the accusation that environmentalists want to take away people’s freedom” (Hall 132). Annihilation represents this fear explicitly. In Chu’s terms, it makes the abstract concept of autonomy concrete through the science-fiction trope of mind control. Area X can physically prevent people from acting out their intentions.⁹ It can also influence their will to choose actions they would not otherwise endorse; as the biologist tells us, “members of the second expedition to Area X had committed suicide by gunshot and members of the third had shot each other” (Annihilation 17). Area X’s ability to induce suicide plays on the fear that environmentalism will require us to stop valuing our individual lives and goals. The tale of in-group murder, meanwhile, alludes to a tradition of secret-invasion narratives, in which some people, having become hosts for malign aliens, sow paranoia among the human community until the tension erupts in a bloodbath.¹⁰

This tradition is often connected, with reason, to xenophobic or ideological paranoia, yet despite the unregenerate politics some mind-control plots have contained, Annihilation does not dismiss the horror of autonomy’s violation.¹¹ To do so would imply that autonomy is not valuable, an implication that undermines ethical persuasion. After all, if one cannot determine one’s will or actions, one cannot meaningfully choose to reorder one’s values according to green priorities or act on that reordering. Thus, when the psychologist insinuates that the Southern Reach has greater power over its expedition members than they know—that the organization may have implanted many false memories in their minds, not just influencing but nearly determining their beliefs about the world—the biologist flatly asserts that beyond a certain point her mind is “inviolate,” an assertion that she justifies in this way: “Of this I was certain, and would continue to be certain, because I had no choice” (129). She is certain of her autonomous control over her will, necessarily, because autonomy, no matter how compromised, is a precondition of self-directed action per se. As both a character in narrative fiction and an ethical agent, the biologist must act: in a plot, as in life, the skeptical void is death.

Instead of dismissing autonomy as unimportant or illusory, Annihilation posits it as a real phenomenon, of real value. To persuade readers that accepting environmental ethics would not entail restrictions on their autonomy any more radical than those they already experience, the novel exposes contemporary human society’s violations of that autonomy. Early in her account, the biologist informs us that the psychologist “put us all [the expedition] under hypnosis to cross the border, to make sure we remained calm” (4). After the biologist is exposed to spores in Area X, she becomes “immune to the psychologist’s hypnotic suggestions” and witnesses their effects on her other colleagues, the anthropologist and the surveyor: We knew that the psychologist’s role was to provide balance and calm in a situation that might become stressful, and that part of this role included hypnotic suggestion. I could not blame her for performing that role. But to see it laid out so nakedly troubled me. It is one thing to think you might be receiving hypnotic suggestion and quite another to experience it as an observer.(33)

The Southern Reach requires its volunteers to compromise their autonomy in order to participate in Area X expeditions. This requirement gestures in synecdoche to a whole host of practical restrictions on freedom that a society may require of its members. Insofar as the Southern Reach, the only named organization in Annihilation,¹² stands in for the human social sphere, its use of hypnosis implies that human society imposes a radical restriction on autonomy: like Area X, it seriously influences not only what its members can do but also what they can will.

This claim about society’s regulation of the will is nothing new. It is intimately familiar to most literary scholars, steeped as we are in the tradition of Foucault, Derrida, and others; similar intuitions are widespread in the extra-academic cultural imagination as well.¹³ What the biologist experiences is not a revelation that preconscious social influences on the will exist, then. Instead, she is coming to suspect that social influences, of which she is already aware, are both more extensive than she had guessed and less powerful, in that Area X’s material influence is capable of disrupting them. One can gloss this disruption in terms both of nonhuman theory and of ethics. Rebekah Sheldon has claimed that poststructuralist arguments, according to which culture determines what we can know, unfortunately entail that “we have no access to the real” and thus end by endorsing “the distinction between the activity of culture and the mute inscrutability of nature” they are trying to undermine (200). Nonhuman-friendly new materialisms, by contrast, reject cultural determinism by reminding us that “matter also acts and in sometimes unexpected ways” on our experience of reality (202). Viewed through a new-materialist lens, Area X is an existent physical force whose irreducibility to social construction enables thinking and willing over which culture lacks determining power. In the parlance of ethics, we might say that the biologist’s experience allows her to “learn much about [herself] from [her] own spontaneous and unreflective reactions” (Smith 249). Seeing the psychologist hypnotize their colleagues, the biologist reacts differently than she did to the abstract possibility of hypnosis. Area X forces the biologist to confront the Southern Reach’s assaults on autonomy and thus challenges her “to defend or disavow her attitudes” about them (267).

With this challenge, Annihilation asks readers whether the “ecologically irresponsible forms of freedom” that the Southern Reach, as a stand-in for human society, represents actually do more justice to autonomy as a value than Area X does (Hall 133). Area X may have compelled a previous expedition to annihilate itself, but ultimately, we learn that the novel’s title likely derives, not from the threat Area X poses, but from the “activation word” the psychologist has chosen to “help induce immediate suicide” in the other expedition members if she judges it necessary (Annihilation 135). That the Southern Reach has “given self-destruct buttons” to its members powerfully allegorizes the suicidal nature of human society’s unsustainable environmental practices. Meanwhile, Area X’s material disruption of the Southern Reach’s social control cannot give the biologist complete autonomy—in any system, she will be subject to powerful external influences—but it does give her enough breathing room to make an ethical choice about the system to which she would rather be subject, given the hierarchy of values each seems to enact. Annihilation uses the science-fiction trope of mind control to render these abstract considerations about influence, autonomy, and ethics dramatic and immediate, presenting readers directly with a choice that theory and realist fiction often represent as vague, distant, or nonexistent.

Ecological Affairs

In addition to comparing the merits of human society (the Southern Reach) and primarily nonhuman environmental communities (Area X), Annihilation proposes that adopting greener values would require us to change our beliefs about the relative value of human-human and human-nonhuman relations. The novel endorses de-emphasizing human relationships in favor of a larger human-nonhuman community. Importantly, privileging human-nonhuman community does not entail that relationships between human beings lack value: such an entailment would violate Hall’s injunction against “deny[ing] that transforming existing ways of life will involve any genuine loss” (125–26). As in its treatment of autonomy, Annihilation acknowledges feelings of horror at the subordination of human-human relationships, often seen as the sine qua non of a good life, to a larger community of primarily nonhuman beings. In so doing it acknowledges that we “value many things, not all of which are compatible,” and it nevertheless implies that for ethical reasons we should prefer human-nonhuman communities to exclusively human ones (Hall 126).

Annihilation stages the conflict between human-human and human-nonhuman relations by suggesting that the biologist became estranged from her husband because she chose to interact with the world in a manner adapted to human-nonhuman communities. Her husband, who accepts the individualist ethos of contemporary Western societies, in particular their valorization of monogamous romantic love, interprets the biologist’s mode of interaction as a rejection or exclusion of him. As their marriage reaches crisis, he volunteers for the Southern Reach’s eleventh expedition. He dies of cancer shortly after his mysterious return from Area X, about which he remembers nothing. Having volunteered for the twelfth expedition, the biologist discovers inside Area X’s strange lighthouse a heap of journals from previous expeditions and writes: [E]ven as my husband wanted me to be assimilated in a sense, the irony was that he wanted to stand out. Seeing that huge pile of journals, this was another thing I thought of: That he had been wrong for the eleventh expedition because of this quality. That here were the indiscriminate accounts of so many souls, and that his account couldn’t possibly stand out. That, in the end, he’d been reduced to a state that approximated my own.(110)

Did the biologist’s husband contradict himself in wanting both for himself to “stand out” and for his wife to “assimilate” to human society? In fact, it is possible to resolve these apparently hypocritical desires. The biologist implies—and the rest of the trilogy confirms—that the events she narrates take place in the contemporary United States. She and her husband belong to a culture where the value of individualism is not so much stated as assumed, and the desire to stand out, to be famous, is nearly ubiquitous. Ergo, desiring fame is assimilation—to a society that degrades the environment and devalues the nonhuman.

By casting a negative light on individualism, this context suggests new interpretations of the namelessness expedition members adopt inside Area X. Given the Southern Reach’s instrumentalist attitude toward its employees, their policy of substituting professional designations for names may reflect their desire for total command. The policy reduces people to their jobs—biologist, surveyor, anthropologist, psychologist—and so attempts to restrict their actions to those of a particular professional role. Considered in these terms, it is another strategy to inhibit autonomy. On the other hand, an environmentally based suspicion of contemporary individualism should make us unwilling to interpret the relinquishment of names solely as a form of human social control. The biologist takes quite well to namelessness, but she retains her distance from the Southern Reach and its goals. She recognizes options beyond individualism or absorption into depersonalizing institutions. Reminiscing on her and her husband’s social life, she articulates her relation to the world in this way: [F]un for me was sneaking off to peer into a tidal pool, to grasp the intricacies of the creatures that lived there. Sustenance for me was tied to ecosystem and habitat, orgasm the sudden realization of the interconnectivity of living things. Observation had always meant more to me than interaction. . . . And yet, I was nothing but expression in other ways. My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease.(110)

The biologist describes, here, neither an atomized self nor dissolution into a larger whole. Thus her description fits neither contemporary individualism, nor object-oriented ontology’s thesis of the untouchable essence of things, nor the new materialist intuition that external forces and relations precede, constitute, and reveal as illusory the fleeting phenomenon we call selfhood. The biologist acknowledges her dependence on larger human-nonhuman communities; by referring to “ecosystem and habitat” as “[s]ustenance” for her, she gestures both toward her material reliance on the web of food consumption and her spiritual reliance on the “interconnectivity of living things.”

At the same time, the biologist’s dependence on community is compatible with an identity separable from that community. She is willing to become deeply enmeshed in various ecosystems, yet while they “impress themselves upon” her, she remains able to disentangle herself from them. The very plurality of the word places indicates that she can enter into such relations serially without loss of self. The biologist enters one place, receives its stamp, and leaves; when she enters another place, she bears the stamp of her previous habitat, but she is still the biologist. Her selfhood is penetrable, adaptable, and relational, but its continuity is not thereby violated. Thus she avoids both her husband’s conventional individualism and self-annihilating absorption into the Southern Reach. Her indifference to the unique yet representative name that a traditionally realist narrative would have given her illustrates not that she accepts the Southern Reach’s instrumental use of her, but that her identity relies on a dialectic between individual “[o]bservation” and the “expression” of environmental belonging in a way realist naming practices do not capture.

The analogy Annihilation draws between the biologist’s sexuality and her affinity for the nonhuman, rendered explicit in her yoking of “the sudden realization of the interconnectivity of living things” to “orgasm,” articulates the incompatibility of exclusive romantic commitment, as contemporary society conceives of it, and the sort of human-nonhuman community she craves. Before their involvement with Area X, the biologist and her husband live in a city, though she hates the environmental degradation that accompanies it. To prevent urban life from becoming unbearable, the biologist begins furtive “late-night” visits to “an empty lot overgrown with grass,” which has become a habitat for various nonhuman organisms (156). When her husband asks her about these solitary trips, she replies: “I’m not cheating on you if that’s what you mean” (155). Yet her denial encourages us to see what she is doing as formally analogous to, though not the same as, adultery. She leaves her husband late at night and conceals her destination because, she feels, the benefits she derives from the lot would be destroyed if it were incorporated into those “rituals” that “couples do from habit and because they are expected to” (156). In contrast to the social regulations that permeate marriage, the lot’s “urban wilderness” gives her “miniature dramas to look forward to” (157). This contrast between domestic routines and wild little dramas is such a given in adultery plots that Madame Bovary was already satirizing it in 1856. Later, the biologist strengthens the adultery analogy further: “I didn’t know that while I was applying this Band-Aid to my need to be unconfined, my husband was dreaming of Area X and much greater open spaces. But, later, the parallel helped assuage my anger at his leaving.” Though her husband did not divorce her when he joined the Southern Reach, and Area X is not another woman (or “the other woman”), the biologist sees her own needs reflected in her husband’s desire to be free of the city and their marriage. In Annihilation, exclusively human communities are stifling, thwarting our desire for more expansive, less anthropocentric webs of relation.

The biologist and her husband initially found their different interactive styles a source of mutual attraction; the difference became a problem because, she speculates, her husband believed “that once he got to know [her] better, he could still break through to some other place, some core where another person lived inside of [her]” (77). This belief assumes both the confessional nature of language— it is the biologist’s taciturnity he seems to blame for his failure to “break through”—and the singularity of their marital relationship, which would somehow give him epistemological access not simply to additional knowledge about her but to “another person.” The diction here—one party “break[ing] through” and accessing the other’s otherwise inviolable “core”—suggests a kind of epistemological aggression, while the desire that the biologist contain another self, accessible only to her husband, suggests possessiveness and a denial of what she is in favor of some ideal of her.

Yet the novel ultimately suggests that the biologist and her husband could have saved their marriage if they had subsumed it into a larger human-nonhuman community, where their bond would have been one among many, compatible with and enriched by a larger web of relations. Having discovered in Area X’s lighthouse her husband’s expedition journal, the biologist reads his last address to her: Seeing all of this, experiencing all of it, even when it’s bad, I wish you were here. I wish we had volunteered together. I would have understood you better here, on the trek north. We wouldn’t have needed to say anything if you didn’t want to. It wouldn’t have bothered me. Not at all. And we wouldn’t have turned back. We would have kept going until we couldn’t go farther.(167)

The admission that he “would have understood [her] better” in Area X, an environment full of inscrutable nonhuman life, implies that certain unreasonable demands common to human relation-ships—total exposure of one to the other; a split between a performative and an authentic self, the latter of which is made accessible as a kind of reward—may become ridiculous in a community where most relations—human to tree, tree to tree, otter to river, river to salt marsh, salt marsh to ocean—are nonverbal or predicated on non-epistemological relations. As panpsychist Steven Shaviro has noted, in “all interactions between entities, when one thing affects, or is affected by, another,” any party can interact with “even those aspects of [its relata] that it cannot come to ‘know’“ (39). “We wouldn’t have needed to say anything if you didn’t want to,” the biologist’s husband promises her, a promise he can make, perhaps, because Area X has taught him a logic of sustainable coexistence independent of coercive linguistic exposure.

By asking us to subsume human relations into largely nonhuman environmental communities, Annihilation demands a sacrifice from us: we must give up the idea that a single human-human relationship, a perfect romantic union characterized by exclusivity and mutual transparency, is of paramount importance to a good life. Though not an individualist, the biologist values her ability to relate without being absorbed. Reading her husband’s journal, she realizes she could have “met him partway and retained [her] sovereignty”; she could have had the same intimate relationship with him that she has with “tidal pools and fungi,” a comparison that gestures toward the practical, emotional, and ethical improvements that placing her marriage in the context of a larger human-nonhuman community might have occasioned (167). In the same way that Annihilation examines the different kinds of partial autonomy that the Southern Reach and Area X afford ethical agents, it also examines the way in which demoting human relationships from the high rung they occupy in our hierarchy of value, though it would require sacrifice, might in some ways more fully actualize the potential goodness of all our affiliations.

In our contemporary moment, when environmental degradation and its denial both run rampant, theorists of the nonhuman have tackled a difficult, admirable project: focusing our ethical attention on entities who affect and are greatly affected by our behavior, yet often go undiscussed in public conversations about climate change. Nevertheless, many of these theorists undermine their ethical arguments to preserve their commitment to epistemological humility. Fiction, in particular weird science fiction, can circumvent this problem. By making environmental values a given in the textual world, communicated via form rather than endlessly debatable content, fiction can represent and model environmental ethics without having to claim specific positive knowledge. The subgenre of weird science fiction, as Annihilation demonstrates, offers heretofore largely untapped potential for persuasive discourse on environmental ethics. The weird’s tendency to oscillate between intense appreciation for and horror of nonhuman entities allows weird texts to model green values, while still acknowledging human ambivalence toward environmentalist ethics and the sacrifices they entail. It will be interesting to see whether subsequent weird writers will explore this ethical and aesthetic territory where Jeff VanderMeer has broken trail.

Finally, fiction’s plots, its commitment to representing praxis, allow it to model the necessity for action even where total understanding is lacking. The biologist acknowledges, and sometimes enjoys, the incomplete knowledge that characterizes her relationships with other organisms both human and nonhuman. Annihilation and its sequels, Authority and Acceptance, suggest such incompleteness may be an essential characteristic of epistemological relations between organisms by placing the reader into a similar position of incomplete knowledge with respect to Area X, a central mystery of the trilogy that never fully or neatly resolves. Both the biologist and the novels in which she appears acknowledge the disorientation and horror that such partial mysteries sometimes occasion. Nevertheless, the biologist’s determined, ecologically informed engagement with Area X suggests that, where complete knowledge is impossible, taking ethical action based on one’s basic principles is still feasible and advisable, given that action of some kind is unavoidable in both narrative fiction and life. I hope, then, that Annihilation and its weird science-fiction brethren can provide a model for writers, theorists, and literary critics who want to develop pragmatic forms of green ethical persuasion.

University of Notre Dame