The Sublime
VanderMeer writes with a deep interest in portraying the sublime. The sublime as a philosophical concept developed from the 18th century beginning with Edmund Burke, and was taken up by Kant and Schopenhauer into modern philosophy. The sublime is that which cannot be calculated or conceptualized by the mind: something that you can never truly experience or behold, but that can only overwhelm the human mind. The experience is a mixture of beauty and terror. The biologist describes her encounter with the Crawler in almost exactly these terms: "This moment, which I might have been waiting for my entire life all unknowing—this moment of an encounter with the most beautiful, the most terrible thing I might ever experience—was beyond me" (178).
Throughout the novel, the biologist regards Area X and its inhabitants and structures with a sense of terrified awe suggestive of the sublime. In the beginning, describing the haunting, low moan that accompanies every sunset in Area X, she writes, "The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you" (6). Often, when attempting to describe the landscape of Area X, the biologist finds herself at a loss for words—another symptom of the sublime.
Area X itself seems to parrot back its own sublimity to the explorers in the writing on the tower wall. At one point, the text reads, "… the shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear …" (61). Imagery of the abyss, of shadows, denotes a heavy presence of absence, in other words, of space which is intangible, unable to be conceptualized. The most unexplored spaces in our universe are described as "abysses," like space and the deepest depths of the ocean. Furthermore, the writing on the tower wall recognizes that the effects of Area X are "beyond what any man can bear."
The biologist communicates her bafflement at how something like Area X can exist in the same frame of reference as pedestrian experiences, like a warm, calm afternoon. When they resurface from the tower for the second time and find the psychologist missing, she writes, "How what we had seen below could coexist with the mundane was baffling. It was as if we had come up too fast from a deep-sea dive but it was the memories of the creatures we had seen that had given us the bends" (68). Even before they resurface, the biologist compares the sight of her own bootprints to the tracks of the Crawler and remarks that they are "so mundane in comparison. So boring" (54). Later on in the novel, when remembering her husband's return from Area X (or perhaps the imposter of her husband synthesized by the fruiting bodies of Area X), she describes washing spaghetti off of their plates after dinner "and wondering with a kind of bewilderment how such a mundane act could coexist with the mystery of his reappearance" (154). This statement is almost a carbon copy of her observation of the weather after resurfacing from the tower and underscores the novel's emphasis on the sublime coexisting with the mundane.
Inquiry
By devising a plot around four scientists of various fields venturing into an unknown territory, VanderMeer places inquiry at the core of this novel. But not only are these scientists investigating Area X, taking samples of flora and fauna and writing notes about their findings; they're also investigating each other, sussing out what each person knows, their motivations, and what each person might be withholding from the rest of the group. While the biologist explores the tower with the surveyor, mistrust hangs thick in the air between them. The biologist says, "I saw fear in the surveyor’s eyes, but also a strange determination. I have no idea what she saw in me" (51-52). This is an early example of the emphasis VanderMeer places on the many two-way inquiries at play in the novel.
The third and most unusual form of inquiry is perpetrated by Area X itself; it seems to be investigating the scientists and expeditions even more aggressively than they investigate it. Organisms in Area X raid the explorers' notebooks and absorb their language; the fruiting bodies colonize their bodies and soak their genetic codes into the landscape, thus reproducing and manipulating their DNA to create new organisms with human qualities. When the biologist observes the cells she collects from the psychologist's arm, she says, "I was convinced that when I wasn’t looking at them, these cells became something else, that the very act of observation changed everything. I knew this was madness and yet still I thought it" (159). The biologist's suspicions reinforce this notion of two-way inquiry between the explorers and Area X, which she finally addresses explicitly in the last pages of the book, proposing that "assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation" (190-191).
The Unknown and Alien
Annihilation is fundamentally concerned with a mysterious region called "Area X" that seems to defy even basic constructs of physics on earth, such as space, distance, and time. This area is full of the strange and the unknown; virtually nothing is known about it except that during the previous eleven expeditions, or however many expeditions there actually were, the group members either went crazy and killed each other or were killed by the area itself. Whatever resides in Area X is clearly inhuman, possibly alien, and its influence is spreading and wresting control from humanity's sense of control over the earth's environment. The Crawler is a prime representation of this theme: a mysterious and shifting being whose luminosity is too bright to take in, perpetually scrawling a chilling series of nearly nonsensical words on the inside of a large tower, and reflecting its witnesses own perceptions of it onto itself.
Objectivity vs. Subjectivity
Although science is often considered synonymous with objectivity and empiricism, a major feature of this narrative is its emphasis on the biologist's tendency towards subjectivity and her own constant worries that the reader will suspect the veracity of her account. This leads her to dispense information strategically, like the fact that her husband was a member of the eleventh expedition—which the reader only learns a quarter way into the novel. In dispensing this piece of information, the biologist writes, "I know this information might not be hard for anyone to find out, but I have hoped that in reading this account, you might find me a credible, objective witness. Not someone who volunteered for Area X because of some other event unconnected to the purpose of the expeditions. And, in a sense, this is still true, and my husband’s status as a member of an expedition is in many ways irrelevant to why I signed up" (55-56). Though her explanation sounds reasonable enough in the moment, by the end of the novel the reader learns that her husband's participation in a past expedition is anything but irrelevant to her participation.
Three-quarters of the way through the novel, the biologist takes another aside and addresses the reader, asking again for their continued faith as she reveals another piece of information that she previously withheld; this time it concerns the symptoms of her "brightness," the biological changes she undergoes after inhaling the spores. She writes, "It may be clear by now that I am not always good at telling people things they feel they have a right to know, and in this account thus far I have neglected to mention some details about the brightness. My reason for this is, again, the hope that any reader’s initial opinion in judging my objectivity might not be influenced by these details" (150). The effects of the spores may pull the reader in opposing directions with regard to whether they find the biologist's account more or less trustworthy as a result of them. On the one hand, the spores make her immune to hypnotic suggestion, which would suggest that she has more clarity than the other members of the team. On the other hand, the spores may contribute to hallucinations, which may influence her perception of reality.
We know from the accounts of other characters that not everyone sees the same things in Area X. As the biologist approaches the lighthouse, the psychologist described seeing her as a moving flame. The surveyor could somehow tell from a mile away that the biologist was not totally human any longer, and yet from the biologist's perspective, we don't see her that way. She relates this pervasive subjectivity to the way she operates in the field, doing research. Of her time on a fellowship in a remote fishing town, she writes, "I was the queen of the tidal pools, and what I said was the law, and what I reported was what I had wanted to report. I had gotten sidetracked, like I always did, because I melted into my surroundings, could not remain separate from, apart from, objectivity a foreign land to me" (173). Early on, she comments on her tendency to lose sight of objectivity and her internal resistance to this tendency, writing, "it was a feeling I often had when out in the wilderness: that things were not quite what they seemed, and I had to fight against the sensation because it could overwhelm my scientific objectivity" (30).
Secrets and Suspicion
This novel is permeated by a tense anxiety, and the expedition quickly devolves into an arena of total suspicion between explorers. Southern Reach holds many secrets back from the members of the twelfth expedition, and the psychologist is secretly manipulating the others through hypnotic suggestion, leading to the death of the anthropologist. Despite all of the horrible events of the novel, including the suicide of the psychologist and the mental breakdown of the surveyor, the vulnerability of the characters does not lead to any bonds of trust at all; as the psychologist is dying, she is still keeping secrets from the biologist, and most of the human interaction in this novel feels like an interrogative struggle for power.
Over the course of the novel, some of the lies perpetuated by the Southern Reach agency are exposed, either through the journal accounts of previous explorers or by the biologist's rigorous inquiry. Among them are that there have only been twelve expeditions (there were many more), and that the black boxes on their toolbelts actually detected danger (they were simply a psychological ploy, a type of placebo to give the explorers a false sense of security).
Adaptation and Specialization
Another important theme in Annihilation is specialization. The four scientists, with different specialties and educational backgrounds, naturally bring different perspectives and emphasize different aspects of the environment they are exploring. In this way, the notion of a single "objective" scientific perspective is challenged, because each of the explorers will look at Area X through a different lens based on their background. For example, while studying the cursive script written in fruiting bodies on the walls of the tower, the biologist writes, "I felt a surge of irritation, but it wasn’t directed at [the surveyor]. I had the wrong brain for this task, and so did she; we needed a linguist. We could look at that latticework script for ages and the most original thought I would have is that it resembled the sharp branching of hard coral" (49).
Specialization is, in many ways, a catalyzed, artificial form of adaptation, which is a process emphasized by the biologist's background, but also inherent to Area X as a transitional environment. The life forms in Area X are colonized by fruiting bodies and integrated into its accepted code. This process is mirrored by the way the biologist describes the behavior of animals living in cities. When she describes the animals in the vacant lot near her city home, she writes, "they all had a watchfulness about them that was different from animals in true wilderness; this was a jaded watchfulness, the result of a long and weary history" (156). It is strange to think of animals in human terms like "jaded," but it emphasizes the way they've adapted to their environment and how the different dangers of city life and proximity to humans have changed the way they behave in an inherent, instinctual way.
Psychological Horror
Underlying the entire novel is a sense of creeping dread, which seems to emanate from Area X and permeate the minds of all who enter. Everything takes on a terrifying, anxiety-ridden aspect, especially the human mutations and traces of past violence littering Area X. This mind-annihilating horror is subtle yet overwhelming, and it has often led to mental breakdowns of previous expedition members. Many phenomena are left unexplained, and this growing horror continues unabated, gnawing at the reader's mind. This psychological horror is a key ingredient in "weird fiction," a genre in which Jeff VanderMeer is a towering figure.
