Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Valls Oyarzun, Eduardo, editor. Title: Avenging nature : the role of nature in modern and contemporary art and literature / edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, [and four others]. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2020. | Series: Ecocritical theory and practice | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "Avenging Nature explores how nature strikes back against human domination. International experts examine, from a multipdisciplinary perspective, the insubordinate representations of nature in modern and contemporary art and literature, and advocate for the insurgence of nature within and outside the realm of culture"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020012264 (print) | LCCN 2020012265 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793621443 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793621450 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Ecocriticism. | Literature, Modern--History and criticism--Theory, etc. | Nature in literature. | Dystopias in literature. | Nature in motion pictures. | Dystopian films--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN98.E36 A94 2020 (print) | LCC PN98.E36 (ebook) | DDC 809/.9336--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012264 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020012265 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . v Contents Introduction 1 Eduardo Valls Oyarzun Part I: Toward a New Ecocritical Ethics 1 Bringing Culture Back to Nature: A Biosemiotic Reading of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 9 Anastasia Cardone 2 “Have You Seen the Snow Leopard?”: Animal Commodity Resistance in Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard 25 Frank Izaguirre 3 “With One Arm I Supported Her: The Other ArmWas the Executioner’s”: An Ecofeminist Reading of Anna Kavan’s Ice 37 Laura de la Parra 4 “We Were Neither What We Had Been nor What We Would Become”: Frankensteinian Science and Liminal States in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation 49 Jessica Roberts 5 Santiago Rusiñol’s Abandoned Gardens: Between the Poetics of Ruin and the Defense of a Lost Identity 61 Laura Sanz García Part II: Empowering Nature 6 Welcoming Cosmos: A Comparative Study of Narrative, Nature, and Cosmopolitanism in The Wall and Pond 79 Hande Gurses Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Contentsvi 7 A Few Sockeyes and Dying Embers in What Is Left of the Forest: Settler Culture and Changing Views of Nature in Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s Latest Novels 93 Pedro Miguel Carmona 8 The Last Epigram: Christian Bök’s Xenotext 109 Ryan Winet 9 A Poetic Correspondence on Ecology and the More–than–Human World: Allan Cooper and Harry Thurston’s The Deer Yard 119 Leonor M. Martínez Serrano 10 Wonders and Threats of Symbiotic Relationships in the Anthropocene: Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy 133 Patrycja Austin Part III: The Age of Dystopia 11 Demonizing Nature: Ecocriticism and Popular Fantasy 149 Peter Melville 12 Accepting the X: Uncanny Encounters with Nature and the Wilderness in Jeff Vandermeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy 165 Carmen M. Méndez García 13 Ecocritical Archaeologies of Global Ecocide in Twentieth-First- Century Post-Apocalyptic Films 179 Mónica Martí 14 Biohazard, Eco-Terror, and the Rise of Posthuman Dystopia: Re(b)ordering Space to Promote Environmental Ethics in Zal Batmanglij’s The East and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 195 Paula Barba Guerrero 15 Another Inconvenient Truth: Hollywood, the Myth of Green Capitalism 211 Víctor Junco 16 De-Evolution, Dystopia, and Apocalypse in American Postmodern Speculative Fiction 227 Javier Martín Párraga Index 239 About the Editors 243 About the Contributors 247 Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . 165 Chapter Twelve Accepting the X Uncanny Encounters with Nature and the Wilderness in Jeff Vandermeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy CarmenM. Méndez García Though published in 2014, the three novels in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance) have already generated a large body of criticism from very different fields, probably due to the many literary genres (contemporary Gothic, cli-lit, ecocriticism, posthumanism, border studies, animal studies, and new weird fiction, among others) that VanderMeer seems to use, question, and transform.1 The many genres in the trilogy seem especially adequate in these novels about hybridization, adapta- tion, mutation, and the end of one domineering species (humankind)’s con- trol over others. In the following pages, I would like to discuss Area X (the predominant space in all three novels) as a liminal region, a heterotopia which is the only environment where authentic encounters with the utterly uncanny may hap- pen. I will argue that the encounters are narrated using conventions from adventure fiction as a genre, connected with human (and thus, organized and rational) exploration on the one hand, and with scientific discoveries and interpretation on the other. For the last two centuries, with the closure of the age of discovery on Earth, the genre of adventure fiction seems to have mutated into the science-fictional subgenre of space exploration. And the final explanation for the appearance of Area X is that it is, indeed, of alien origin: it has been created by an advanced civilization so that the land can modify itself genetically and mutate to repair the environmental damage produced by humans. However, in its setting along the coast of Florida, in its use of characters that never leave Earth while trying to understand the area as Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Carmen M. Méndez García166 simply a mutation of already-existing life on Earth and/or as the effect of human–produced degradation of natural spaces, the Southern Reach trilogy seems to be paradoxically very much anchored in reality, which in my opin- ion brings it closer to the classic configurations of adventure fiction than to other tropes associated with space exploration science fiction. Area X is then, in these texts, configured as the contact zone (a term made popular by science fiction, but already present as a concept in early explora- tion narratives) were troubled encounters between representatives of the hu- man and utterly abject (i.e., non-understandable in human terms) Others take place: these encounters are mediated by our awareness, as readers, of the deep changes produced in our surroundings by our species, with an under- standing of our role in deeply modifying our environment and the Environ- ment (with a capital E) during what has been called the Anthropocene. In the novels, a part of Florida known as Area X is being reclaimed by nature after an unexplained accident, and the expeditions sent to make sense of the new space or to bring it back to civilization invariably fail in their endeavor. Nature seems to be fighting back against the colonizing and de- structive actions of humanity: the domestication of the marshlands, the exter- mination of Native Americans by successive waves of Spanish, French, and British inhabitants, the oil spills and the pollution. Thriving with new plants and mutated animals, and stubbornly unmappable, Area X resists interpreta- tion: it refuses both the cartographic and the taxonomical efforts that have historically defined the encounters of human and nature, and its continuous expansion may also imply the collapse of civilization. One after another, the members of the expeditions sent to Area X have not only failed in making sense out of this new nature, but also in “finding” themselves in it. The unknowable environment that VanderMeer presents unveils the pastoral genre as a human invention, a “safe” domestication and ordering of nature that satisfies humanity’s rational drives by repressing the real, untamed state of flora and fauna. Explorers in Area X are made insane by the unknowable surroundings and kill each other or are consumed and incorporated into Area X as new, monstrous organisms. The acts of recogni- tion or, conversely, abjection by which human beings often relate to nature become, thus, useless. While missing explorers of Area X are often incorporated into the area by being transformed into animals resembling local wildlife, there are a few examples of uncanny animals that emphasize the anthropocentric need to understand the animal Other in human terms. One of them is a creature resembling a boar, but with a (familiar) human face, a grotesque being that cannot be fully identified as human or non-human (hence its uncanniness). There are, similarly, dolphins with human eyes, and an owl that one of the protagonists in Acceptance decides to charge with human intentions and Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Accepting the X 167 motivations, trying to give human explanations for what may just be animal behavior. Further summarizing the context and rhetorical strategies of all three books would go beyond the intentions of this chapter: the books follow a non-linear narrative, they have different narrative voices (a diary written in the first person in Annihilation; a third-person, past-tense, focalized narrator in Authority; and five different perspectives and timelines in Acceptance), but all have Area X, as quicksand, as an ever-mutating black hole, at their center. Since my focus will be on Area X, I feel that a description taken from the beginning of the second book, Authority, may help explain what the area looks like, at least objectively, from the outside: [a]bout thirty–two years ago, along a remote southern stretch known by some as the “forgotten coast,” an Event had occurred that began to transform the landscape and simultaneously caused an invisible border or wall to appear. A kind of ghost or “permeable pre-border manifestation” as the files put it—light as fog, almost invisible except for a flickering quality—had quickly emanated out in all directions from an unknown epicenter and then suddenly stopped at its current impenetrable limits (VanderMeer 2014c, 35). The Event itself is never explained: it is interesting, however, that what is used to cover up the existence of the area is an environmental disaster, and that the area is referred to as a disaster site. Both words, “event” and “disas- ter” seem to emphasize the accidental, one-time-only quality of whatever changed the area, while eluding direct, continuous human responsibility. However, VanderMeer—whom David Tompkins, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, has referred to as a successor to Henry David Thoreau and Rachel Carson, as “keenly attuned to the ecological issues of his moment” (Tomp- kins 2014)—has often recognized his preoccupation with the long–lasting effects of our habitation as a species on the planet. The official story from Southern Reach, the clandestine government agency created to study, moni- tor and control the region, is, however, that Area X is an oddity that is, paradoxically, both created by human negligence (an environmental disaster) and not a human responsibility (an accident). Area X is, indeed, the X, the mystery at the core of the trilogy: as readers, we plunge into it willing to solve the conundrum of its existence. What this area holds, what this area is, what the nature of this Nature is, whether it is a living entity or just a setting, are questions that are not dissimilar to those posed by the diaries of early explorers and adventurers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The trilogy itself is, then, an attempt at uncovering the enigma of Area X, and in trying to use rational, human thought, the characters and narrators turn to exploring, analyzing, and dissecting the space. Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Carmen M. Méndez García168 XMARKS THE SPOT: MAPS AND TAXONOMIES IN AREA X Maps and charts are at the core of both land and sea exploration, with accom- panying tools, such as compasses, being early and deeply useful technologies for humans to orient themselves, so as to take exploration beyond individual endeavors and to transform it into a communal, repeatable, scalable effort. The creation of maps only acquires full meaning when they can be passed on to explorers that will encounter the same land, and improve on those maps, in future travels. At the beginning of Annihilation, we encounter the only survivor of the twelfth expedition: a woman referred to, simply, as the biologist. In the eleven previous expeditions technologies such as recorders, communicators, compasses, or the orientation provided by maps, have failed: explorers are required to keep their own travel diaries, in an attempt to reconstruct, given the lack of working objective technological tools, a kind of multifaceted, subjective explanation for the existence and ontology of Area X. Even the simplest of maps obtained from the observations of previous explorers (who systematically get sick and die soon after coming back from the area) be- comes useless from one expedition to the next, or even in the course of just one expedition. Two towers, however, seem to be more or less stable as spatial markers for the area: one of them is a lighthouse, one of the few remains of human activity in the region; the other, a topographical anomaly, also confusingly referred to as “a tower” by the biologist, but as a tunnel by the other characters. The topographical anomaly is not found in maps, and it is described, very early in the first book, as something that seems created (though not necessarily by humans), but also as something that should not be there nor exist at all. When the members of the twelfth expedition find it, the biologist explains that At first, only I saw it as a tower. I don’t know why the word tower came to me, given that it tunneled into the ground. I could as easily have considered it a bunker or a submerged building. Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remem- bered the lighthouse on the coast (VanderMeer 2014b, 5). The tower/tunnel thus becomes another crack in the ontological security of the explorers: not only because it should not exist since it is not in the official maps, but also because it is not semantically stable: it should be either a tunnel or a tower, but it cannot be both. Likewise, the lighthouse, which as a beacon of light is one of the staples of sea navigation, marking a safe, stable haven, is imagined as “a glowing flower in a hole at the bottom of the sea” (VanderMeer 2014a, 56), not fit to provide guidance as to the limits of Area X. Jon Hegglund has indicated that the narrative “presents a plausible, realist Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Accepting the X 169 spatiality on the sentence level,” but the mental map of what is narrated “undermines any notion of a normative ‘real world’ from which mimetic representation may or may not be derived” (2020, 36). Gry Ulstein has re- ferred to the “intensely real spatiality” of the area as “creating Escheresque spatial ruptures” (2019, 139). And just as Escher’s engravings emphasize the discordance between what is seen by the eyes and what is interpreted by the brain, Area X’s continuous mutation, its geographical indeterminacy, makes the process of creating and reading maps futile. Another main feature of maps, that of scale, which helps travelers orient themselves in space through the abstract representation of a given territory, is also denied by the existence of Area X, which as an area that “has no borders and produces creatures of unfathomable dimensions” (Tesselaar 2019, 2), and where the same trip may take a night or half a week, with characters inside the area attesting to having stayed there for only two days while they have been gone for three years following external time. Orientation provided by stable markers, by maps, by compasses, by recognizable borders and landmarks, is one of the ways in which humans apply reason to, and make sense of, a space: in its troubling and ultimately unknowable existence, Area X is a space of utter disorienta- tion. Another way in which human beings try to make sense of reality is writing: even writing to oneself works as a way to solidify knowledge, to give stability to our understanding of our surroundings. The task given to the members of all expeditions is two–fold: on the one hand, writing in their field diaries may help them, individually, to come to terms with Area X, an uncan- ny landscape that not only affects the senses, but also creates, as Amaris E. Montes has described, a deep “ontological instability” (2018, 79). On the other hand, the Southern Reach hopes to be able to create some kind of collaborative version of what the expeditions encounter that is more objec- tive than isolated individual accounts. Field journals are recognizable artifacts in adventure narratives: they em- phasize analytical thinking, which is supposed to be one of the strengths of the protagonists and narrators of such tales, while also allowing the reader to witness the progressive fall into madness of the writer of the journal when confronted with the unknown or the uncanny. Just as Area X challenged scientific capture, with technological equipment being disturbed by the space and failing to work the moment it enters the area, providing readings that are undecipherable, as if Area X “declines to be interpreted” (VanderMeer 2014a, 44), writing about the experience in the diaries is also an insufficient tool, since Area X disturbs one of the main instruments human have to understand the world and communicate it to others: language. Area X “con- fuses normal human abilities to speak about a place” (Mundy 2019, 52): the instability of the signifier/signified relationship when referring to the topo- graphical anomaly, at the same time tower and tunnel, would be a good Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Carmen M. Méndez García170 example. The biologist’s diary shows her growing absorption by and accep- tance of Area X, an acceptance that is, however, not rational and which cannot be explained in rational terms through writing. The characters do not have the words to talk about Area X: even if, in our Romantic assumptions about Nature with a capital N, we often insist that Nature should be experi- enced, not described, writing still remains one of our main ways of relating to nature. Not having the words to describe Area X creates a “cumulative con- fusion” that, to Brad Tabas, seems to be suggesting that whatever that nature is “does not fit with any of our names or descriptions, that it is a thing with no proper analogue in our language and no proper precursor in our past perceptions” (2015, 12). Area X is beautiful, thriving, but scary to humans mostly because it cannot be described, what produces a continuous stream of “failures of language to signify, failures of mediation and translation and even perception” (Doane 2019, 26). The biologist, just as “centuries of ex- plorers encountering alien land before her . . . cannot make sense of this exotic terrain, even while relying on the maps and journals of her predeces- sors” (Hogue 2016, 159). Just as the biologist (and, later, the protagonist of the second book, John “Control” Rodriguez) ends up mutating, accepting and becoming a part of a space she cannot understand rationally, the diaries are found at the end of book one to be part of the lighthouse, turned into a decomposing pile that can be interpreted as “dead bodies, a rotting mound that documents a history of unnamed expeditions gone awry” (Kortekallio 2019, 68). As the biologist notes, “from below, the way the midden spilled out in ripples and hillocks of paper became more apparent. Torn pages, crushed pages, journal covers warped and damp. Slowly the history of exploring Area X could be said to be turning into Area X” (VanderMeer 2014b, 112; emphasis added). Naming and classifying, finding specific words for specific objects, could be said to be the original, and also ultimate, rational motion of individuation produced by humans. Whitby, one of the characters working for the Southern Reach, gets obsessed with taxonomizing Area X and its constituent parts: naming is solving the mystery. The instability of Area X and what it holds, its existence as “not a being but a becoming” (Sendur 2019, 52), does not keep Whitby from creating a “grotesque museum” that Brian Onishi has connected with cabinets of curiosities that became prevalent in the sixteenth century and which were connected to the age of exploration, “constructed from a collection of strange and wondrous objects . . . a means of organizing, cataloguing, and representing the breadth and interconnectedness of reality” (2017, 69). Just as the biologist’s efforts to read Area X, when she is pene- trated by nature after approaching fluorescent lichen and leaning in “closer, like a fool, like someone who had not had months of survival training or ever studied biology. Someone tricked into thinking that words should be read” (VanderMeer 2014b, 25), the fruitless efforts by Whitby to make sense of the Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Accepting the X 171 objects and incomplete or incongruous scientific data displayed in his cabinet of curiosities end up having the uncanniness of Area X enter his mind and drive him to insanity (a fate common to other fictional explorers). The in- comprehensibility of Area X thus ends up spilling into the agency exploring it, something that is especially relevant as the agency is at first described as a model of static officialdom, sunk by the “byzantine depths of its crumbling bureaucracy” (Magnone 2016), a place where power plays are seen in terms of control of the space, with characters trying to impose on each other’s “territory, to show . . . [they are] comfortable there” (VanderMeer 2014c, 159), something that Siobhan Carroll connects to “the history of imperial- ism” (2016, 79) also found in Florida. The Southern Reach as a space is shown as deteriorating, clearly suggesting that it is a failing space for a failing task: understanding Area X. As I have mentioned, the encounter between the Southern Reach and Area X can be read as a “first contact” narrative, one that has its precedents in adventure narratives and which has lately been almost solidified in the encounters, through outer space exploration, of alien civilizations in science fiction. Early first contact narratives such as the Indies chronicles already emphasized what has become a staple of the genre: the sense of wonder, the mystery that a brave new world and its peoples produce in the explorer. Area X could, then, be read as the ultimate mystery: its origin is unknown, its possibilities and capabilities ever-mutating and incomprehensible, and even its existence as a place is hard to conceptualize (how long does it reach for, why is it that usual time–space coordinates seem not to work inside the area itself). Something that is noticeable about the Southern Reach trilogy as a first contact text, however, is that it often lacks the utter horror that is often found in narratives about adventure and exploration, such as At the Moun- tains of Madness (1936), by H. P. Lovecraft. There is, rather, an acceptance, even an exhilaration at the possibilities of this utterly distinct reality and its thriving existence, once the characters are relieved of the rational need to understand it imposed by the Southern Reach. In the encounter with Area X, characters (not only, but significantly, the one dubbed “Control”) need to let go of their own controlling attitudes, of trying to understand nature in order to feel at ease with it, an attitude that Benjamin Robertson connects with the need for the protagonists to come out of “assumptions about the objectivity of science . . . [and trying to come to terms with] the extent to which they are not the centers of their worlds or the masters of their destinies in the ways they previously believed” (2019, 31). It is certainly significant that VanderMeer places Area X near the coast of Florida, a land that has been subjected to cycles of (Spanish, French, British) colonization, possession and repossession described by Bev Hogue: “con- tested terrain since the moment Europeans first touched on its shores and began the long history of battles . . . that resulted in historical traumas that Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Carmen M. Méndez García172 many would prefer to forget: displacement and destruction of Native American tribes, slavery followed by entrenched racial injustice, and strug- gles for control of land and natural resources” (2016, 149). To Hogue, the way Area X is portrayed turns “Florida itself into a monster reflecting, mim- icking, and consuming human explorers . . . [echoing] the experiences of the early European explorers who encountered in Florida terrifyingly unfamiliar terrain and creatures” (158). Area X had previously been just part of hu- man–inhabited space, and signs of that previous possession of the now un- possessable land can be found in “eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheels spokes half-bur- ied in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-needle loam” (VanderMeer 2014b, 5). The recognizable quality of these images make the expeditioners to Area X and the readers think of the space and life in it as familiar, and thus maybe close to what they know, as a house that could easily be rebuilt into a home, but the reality of the place is that it is dominated by its un-homeliness (unheimlich) uncanniness, something I will develop in the second part of my essay. ENCOUNTERSWITH THE UNCANNY: OTHERNESS IN THE LATE ANTHROPOCENE I have previously referred to the Southern Reach trilogy as using the trope of the contact zone, a liminal place where the Other is encountered. Nature in Area X is completely alien—not necessarily, thought it will prove to be the big reveal in the last novel, because of its out-of-Earth origin, but because it is mostly inexplicable by humans, both the explorers in the books and the readers of the novels. The encounters with the Other in the trilogy partake of what Darko Suvin identifies as a specific kind of cognitive estrangement in science fiction, dealing with “an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (1979, 4). Mundy refers to the world in VanderMeer’s books as part of what she dubs the “ecological uncanny,” which forces us to remember “the repressed knowledge that the world around us is not separate from us; it is a home that we have forgotten is home” (2019, 4). Area X is an environment that used to be “homely” (i.e., domesti- cated, made into a home, a domos) and that is now foreign precisely because it is separate from humanity and non-understandable in human terms. Often referred to as a “pristine wilderness” in the books (and thus expressing a nostalgic but absolutely artificial idea of what nature may have been before it was observed by humans), nature in Area X is far from what Onishi claims we desire as human beings: “carefully manicured gardens, trees that line our freeways, and ‘pristine wilderness’ with a gift shop” (2017, 69). Gardens are Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Accepting the X 173 safe, controlled, and organized in accordance to human needs, desires, and tastes, “safe . . . for cultivating nature as we see fit” versus Area X, a “dangerous garden full of wildness that . . . expels the totalizing knowledge of human project” (65). One of the main tasks of colonizers throughout history was to make a home in their new territory, a process that can be only undertaken, as Sara Crosby states, “by making it like them . . . embark[ing] on a self-conscious program to turn the ‘wilderness’ into a ‘garden’” (2014, 516). Area X does not, however, comply with the awe produced by the sublime Nature, with a capital N, celebrated by the Romantics; it is not, either, compliant with the fallacy of a benign, nurturing mother found in Emerson, or with the pastoral idea of a simpler time where nature and hu- mans could be in communion. Many of the ways in which Area X is unhomely, uncanny, vaguely famil- iar but ultimately causing abjection, is the inability by the expeditioners to make sense of the fauna that they encounter. Most of the cognitive estrange- ment that Suvin refers to takes place in the world-creating effort in the first book of the series, Annihilation, through the field journal of the biologist. The biologist has been specifically selected for the mission because of her training, and her knowledge and recognition of fauna and flora in their natu- ral environments. As the narrative advances, both the biologist and her jour- nal are “contaminated” by Area X (thus negating any possibility of objective scientific analysis, which must keep the observer and the observed—except in the case of the process of participant observation much more common in anthropological and sociological studies—as two separate entities). The biol- ogist’s early astonishment at not being able to categorize the animals that she encounters turns into an acceptance of a different nature with its own laws and, maybe, intentions. VanderMeer uses animals belonging to what has been called “megafauna” (i.e., big, “smart” animals in human terms, which are more likely to produce empathy and a sense of protection in humans, such as panda bears, whales, dolphins, or big cats) to create a sense of cognitive estrangement and uncanniness that would be more difficult to pro- voke using animals that humans often have more problems with seeing as in need of protection (such as insects). Thus, the biologist encounters a pod of dolphins, and one of them rolls “slightly to the side, and it stared at me with an eye that did not, in that brief flash, resemble a dolphin eye . . . it was painfully human, almost familiar” (VanderMeer 2014b, 97). The uncanni- ness of the dolphin is multiplied by the abjection produced by recognizing a human body part in an animal that, though recognized as smart, is supposed to be, rationally, below humans and thus in need of being protected. Area X has fused and mutated the genetic code of both dolphin and human, and created a new kind of animal, part of what Sophia B. Magnone calls an “uncanny menagerie” (2016) that is neither human nor dolphin, and which Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Carmen M. Méndez García174 can also not be considered to be part of a process of evolution, that is, an “improvement” on both species, in human terms. The concept of “terroir,” which is introduced in the second book to talk about the creatures and space produced by Area X, may help us understand what is being said about the existence of a new, inapprehensible, natural world beyond the Southern Reach. Whitby explains terroir as “a wine term . . . the specific characteristics of a place—the geography, geology, and climate that, in concert with the vine’s own genetic propensities, can create a startling, deep, original vintage” (VanderMeer 2014c, 130–131). As Whitby develops, the direct translation of “terroir” is “a sense of place” (131); also, the similar sound of terroir and terror (one of the dominant emotions in the encounters with Area X) though not etymologically related, hint at a possible connection in the mind of the reader. Furthermore, if Area X is to be thought of as a vineyard, the implication is that it can be cultivated, that is, domesti- cated, farmed, turned into something that can be used for and by humans. One of the main causes of transformations in terroir is, precisely, climate change, which is by now agreed on by the scientific community to have been caused by human technological developments: be it either by the direct ac- tion of domestication, or by the work of centuries produced by the Anthropo- cene, human efforts centralized in the Southern Reach attempt to explain the changes as somehow connected to human action. Area X, however, defies apprehension in human measurements: as An- drew Strombeck argues, “it warps landscape, animals, and humans alike, and the expeditions sent into it fail to learn anything, other than ‘something happened’” (2019, 352). This will lead some of the characters, most notably Control, to be convinced that, even if Area X cannot be understood, it must have a purpose: “to kill us, to transform us, to get rid of us” (VanderMeer 2014a, 188). Control describes the land between the Southern Reach building and Area X’s border as a war zone, “just thirty-five miles of paved road and then another fifteen unpaved beyond that, with ten checkpoints in all, and shoot-to-kill orders if you weren’t mean to be there, and fences and barbed wire and trenches and pits” (VanderMeer 2014c, 28), while Whitby refers to the area as “an organism . . . with a million greedy mouths . . . a murderer we’re trying to catch” (VanderMeer 2014a, 43). This understanding of Area X as the villain, as the enemy, as having some kind of “monstrous nature” (Mundy 2019, 12), a destructive element that has to be contained and quaran- tined, is radically different from both the understanding of Ghost Bird (one of the mutations of the biologist produced by Area X) and Control’s final yield into the land. Efforts by the Southern Reach to understand the area, however, always have to do with its being treated as either machine or organic Other, such as the ludicrous moment when two thousand white rabbits are left near the border: there is the hope by the scientists that this excess of input may produce as its output an “overload” of the system which will short-circuit the Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Accepting the X 175 border or the area. Area X is, paradoxically, seen there both as a mechanism which can be forced to shut itself off, and as a thinking enemy with its own evil intentions. The result of the experiment is disappointing: rabbits, an invasive species, do not seem to propagate or exist inside Area X, and they just disappear “as they hit the edge of the border. There was no ripple, no explosion of blood or organs. They just disappeared” (VanderMeer 2014c, 56). The border and Area X do not “react” with any purpose (the rabbits are not killed, nor rejected) that can be understood in rational terms, contradict- ing the Southern Reach’s assumption that it must either have an intention or be inherently dangerous, something that Magnone identifies as “embedded in broad-based cultural norms of sickness and health, contamination versus purity . . . overflowing its boundaries and mixing with the outside world, it is considered suspect—improper, diseased, and potentially dangerous” (2016). It is worth noting at this point that the border itself, in the novels, is invisible and the expeditioners are put under some kind of hypnosis so that they will not remember the act of crossing it, but just appear somewhere in the middle of Area X with no memory of how they crossed it. The contrast between the border himself, hinted at as permeable and fluid, and the complex technical procedure to enter or leave the area hints at Area X as artificially separated from humanity by humans, not by a desire of this alien nature to be discon- nected from its surroundings. The unclear border of Area X can also be seen as a heterotopia in Foucauldian terms, where different realities and interpre- tations of what the space is are forced to coexist. Much of the trilogy can be read as “a story about borders: about the order and security they promise, the function of the divisions they uphold, and most bewitchingly, about what happens when they are breached” (2016). Area X does, when it expands, end human life as we know it, by absorbing and mutating both humans and human–made artifacts. There is a suggestion at the end of the third book that Area X may have, in fact, already absorbed most of the Earth: as W. Andrew Shephard suggests, this can be read as suggestive that the Anthropocene, “like all eras, will eventually come to an end” (2019, 41). The experience of Area X by the biologist is completely opposite to its being an organic or mechanic enemy: she describes the natural surroundings as a space of possibility, “a blank surface that let us write so many things upon it” (VanderMeer 2014b, 9), what Hogue refers to as a “palimpsest” (2016, 159). As compared to the grey bureaucracy of the Southern Reach, Area X is obviously thriving, vibrant, with a most rich biosphere that cannot even be taxonomized in human terms. At the end of the trilogy, Ghost Bird believes in the need to observe the world outside Area X “through the eyes of Area X” (VanderMeer 2014a, 329), recognizing that understanding the new reality does not entail the creation of maps, and refusing to see Area X as enemy or machine, ceding human-centered control of the way space is to be interpreted. At the same time, we witness yet another mutation of the biolo- Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Carmen M. Méndez García176 gist by Area X that clearly emphasizes the borderlessness at the core of the space: the final form of this mutation is “an animal, an organism that had never existed before or that might belong to an alien ecology. That could transition not just from land to water but from one remote place to another, with no need for a door or a border” (VanderMeer 2014a, 196). Ghost Bird recognizes this new creature as both part and not part of her former and present self, while Control is able to imagine his own demise as “melt[ing] into this landscape, becom[ing] part of what he found here, try[ing] to forget what had happened before and become no more or less than the spray against the bow, the foam against the shore, the wind against his face” (VanderMeer 2014c, 327). As a number of critics have analyzed, VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy should be understood in the context of Morton’s hyperobjects, which are deeply connected to the study of our era as part of what has been dubbed the Anthropocene. VanderMeer himself has recognized the link between his trilogy and hyperobjects a posteriori, that is, he learned about the term after having published the books. In his essay “Hauntings in the Anthropocene,” VanderMeer recognizes Morton’s concept of the hyperobject as “central to thinking about storytelling in the modern era . . . a very important signifier for any fiction writer wishing to engage with the fragmented and diffuse issues related to the Anthropocene” (2016). Hyperobjects have been defined by Morton as objects so massively distributed, either in space or time (or both), that they can be imagined or computed, but not touched or seen direct- ly (2013, 37–39). It is easy to see Area X as a hyperobject: the area is distributed in space so that nobody knows exactly its size (at some point, the characters feel that, being in Area X, they may even be outside the Earth), but also its specific moment of origin, and the time of its eventual disappearance, are unknown. Also, as I have developed, any attempts at measuring or ob- serving the area scientifically are doomed to failure. Recognizing the exis- tence of the Anthropocene itself seems to be, today, beyond a scientific task, a deeply moral one. Scientists willing to accept that there is such thing as a geological era called Anthropocene do not quite agree on when such an era would have started: it could extend as far back as the beginnings of organized farming almost twelve thousand years ago, or the age of discoveries, or the nineteenth century and industrialization, or the more recent phase of industri- alization in the second half of the twentieth century. But there is indeed a very recognizable (and mostly pernicious) influence of humankind and hu- man-made technologies on nature and the planet, which may be connected to what is being termed the Holocene extinction or sixth mass extinction, an ongoing destruction of many species of the planet due to the dominance of humans as an unprecedent (even if unaware) global superpredator. As Heg- glund asserts, “the recognition of the Anthropocene has prompted a reexam- ination of what may be possible in the natural world . . . a Europe-sized patch Avenging Nature : The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature, edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, et C op yr ig ht © 2 02 0. L ex in gt on B oo ks . A ll rig ht s re se rv ed . Accepting the X 177 of floating plastics in the Pacific, poison-resistant urban rats, post-Fukushima radioactive boars . . . such actually existing weird materialities blur clear distinctions between the natural and the unnatural” (2020, 29). Our recogni- tion of the Anthropocene also comes at a time when humanity as a species is most strongly coming to question our place in the universe as a whole. The trilogy, however, seems to separate itself from the apocalyptic genre, as there is not so much lamentation for what will be lost, but a celebration of what may happen in that brave weird world defined by uncanny beauty when there are no human left to “understand” or “explain” the result. Yet, the books do emphasize the good in human nature, in a species that seems to be bound to disappear: the novels’ insistence on gender, ethnic, class, and sexual orienta- tion diversity seems not to unflinchingly celebrate the apocalypse as a final solution to the pernicious influence of the species, but maybe as a way to mutate and reconstruct what is positive in human beings, producing new species that can exist in a more balanced relationship with nature. As Doane has stated, the novels “offer readers a gentle, planetary euthanasia that is marked by some horror, yes, but also by fascination and wonder. Death by absorption. By transformation” (2019, 25). VanderMeer has recognized that at the core of his trilogies lies the idea that “without complex viable ecosys- tems for nonhuman life . . . human life will not survive on this planet. And there is, practically speaking, no other place to go. So we need to think deeply about these issues and come up with complex solutions that do the most good and least harm” (2018). The task of the reader, then, lies in the recognition of VanderMeer’s texts as not simply escapist, or apocalyptic, but as a complex political artifact that, using adventure fiction as a genre and emphasizing the imprint and footprint of humans on the spaces we inhabit, may move us towards new ways of relating to the natural world and the planet. NOTE 1. This article was written as part of the research conducted for the Project “Troubling Houses: Dwellings, Materiality, and the Self in American Literature” (FFI2017–82692–P), MINECO/AEI/FEDER, UE), funded by the Spanish Government and the European Union. 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