“I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”
-H.P. Lovecraft, Nemesis
Cosmic horror: it is fear of the unknown, made known, in short. Cosmic horror, New Weird, eldritch horror, surreal horror— all of these are terms for a style of modernist fiction that we most commonly associate with late Victorian times, with Kafka and Robert Chambers, with strict social mores and uptight caste systems that require something a little more “classy” than what we might consider horror today. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published in 1823, well before the advent of Lovecraft and the rest of the late-1800s cast of eldritch horror novelists, and the need for thrilling and frightening stories no doubt had not vanished over the last several decades. Drawing on the sheltered lives and lack of exposure to the outside created by strict social standards in the late 1800s, as well as the racial tensions incited by such classism, writers often took to the fear of the unknown in order to feed the twisted notions within their works (Lovett-Graff, 1997). Cosmic horror draws on these concepts of the unknown, on the fundamental fear of something incomprehensible even to the educated and organized mind, of something whose vast consciousness cares not for the cultural structures that keep civilized society intact: of something able to abstract humanity to the gibbering primates of their theoretical origin.
There is no need to describe in detail just how ill-informed much of this writing was. H.P. Lovecraft, perhaps the best-known writer of cosmic horror of all time, was a deeply antisemitic and racist man, whose fear of what he might consider “gibbering primates” no doubt fueled his hideous fantasies (Lovett-Graff, 1997, Ulstein, 2017). Many of his stories draw on the concept of human life itself as corrosive, a weakness to be bred out, and perhaps this is the attitude he carried towards the cultures and ethnicities that he so deeply feared. Whatever one does not understand, one is capable of fearing.
But how does cosmic horror translate to modern times, in a society that (supposedly) is integrated, multicultural, cosmopolitan and networked back and forth with the entire face of the planet? Humanoid aliens have been written back and forth so many times that they have become a staple of science fiction— what originally might have been horrific to consider, the concept of life outside of Earth, is now a constant character of popular culture. In a world where many diseases have been eradicated by vaccines, environmental dangers are minimal, and predators are nonexistent, what is left for humans to fear? Annihilation (2014), the first book in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, explores just that. The novel is written as the field journal of a biologist, who remains unnamed, as she and a group of experts (an anthropologist, psychologist, and surveyor) explore an area, titled Area X, seemingly inhabited by some kind of rogue biological presence. Plants grow and change around them in incredibly short timeframes, previously unknown species of massive reptiles lurk in the waters, which themselves have defied their borders and turned into a salt marsh, rapidly flooding and growing over the few previous remnants of human civilization within. The biologist’s husband has returned from a previous expedition only a few days prior, only to die rapidly of an unknown and violent cancer, and as the biologist and her peers explore Area X, they discover that their own biological makeup is now subject to revision by the forces within.
VanderMeer makes excellent use of the Kantian principles of sublimity utilized by Lovecraft’s iconic works: “phenomena whose principal characteristics are their formlessness, infinite expanse, or superhuman might […] the limits of language to represent adequately both the awe-inspiring spectacle and the subject’s experience of the violation of the limits of being.” (Ralickas, 2007). In a world where scientists discover new intricacies of the ecological world every day, who is to say there’s nothing insidious lurking just another level of magnification deeper? Who is to say that given our limited understanding of the way our cells function, they will not one day turn against us?
2. “We were neither what we had been nor what we would become once we reached our destination.”
-Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was one source of inspiration for VanderMeer, who describes a vivid dream he had following a wisdom-tooth surgery, days after learning of the spill: a “dark, horrible spiral through [my] mind”, where he encountered “living words on the walls […] made of moss or fungus.” (Strombeck, 2019). The biologist encounters this same phenomenon in Area X: A tower reaching deep into the ground, its top half implied to have once been a lighthouse, severed and moved miles away by the shifting earth, with a staircase descending into darkness, a seemingly endless quote being written in real time in moss on the walls:
“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe…”
…and on, seemingly ad infinitum, until the biologist comes across the entity writing them, a being she calls ‘the Crawler’. The Crawler itself appears to be one of these forms that never were and never could be— the biologist cannot look at it, cannot fathom it, only experiences an agony and a near-blindness, as impossible for VanderMeer to write as for the biologist to describe, that nearly kills her.
Fundamentally, she is changed by witnessing it, her body beginning to bioluminesce, her need for food and water dropping to near-nonexistent. This is the sublime— incomprehensible, impenetrable, all-consuming and all-changing, the force of some kind of twisted evolution the likes of human science have no penetrance into. Area X itself becomes the sublime and horrific along the way, this tension with the environment— as though an environment could, itself, be an entity— coming to a head when the biologist visits that faraway lighthouse, finding there a collection of identical field journals to hers, indicating that many more, perhaps hundreds, of expeditions have come through Area X than she has been told of. Nothing is known of Area X. How can anything not be known after hundreds of well-funded, well-supplied expeditions have passed through it, unless it is, itself, unknowable?
3. “There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.”
-Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation
Area X consumes the surveyor, the psychologist, and the anthropologist in turn, whether they resist or not. The psychologist, who we come to learn knows the most about Area X of anyone, has the rest of the team secretly entrained to hypnotic commands the moment they enter— which the biologist, immune to these commands, discovers in gruesome detail, when she finds the psychologist half-dead from a volatile fungus growing within her skin. The psychologist screams at her— “ANNIHILATION! ANNIHILATION!”, words meant to initiate instant suicide.
From the very start, even if Area X itself does not kill them, the members of the expedition are consumable, expendable. They are nothing, in the face of Area X, which can manifest human-seeming tissue in the blink of an eye, which can paint words in moss, which can create the Crawler. This is the fundamental principle of cosmic horror: insignificance. Some people might say that the religious fear science, and this is perhaps why— the earth is enormous and relatively unexplored, estimates of total species far exceed the numbers that we know of and can categorize, and fundamental understandings of the environment and how it functions have changed dramatically in the past several decades. The bottom of the sea is filled with secrets, the reaches of space are unknown to us, and who knows what might suddenly manifest in a small, coastal area in the western side of the United States, slowly but steadily growing, ready to annihilate us?
And worst of all… does it matter?
References:
VanderMeer, Jeff. Annihilation. 1st edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
Lovett-Graff, Bennett. “”Life Is a Hideous Thing”: Primate-Geniture in H. P. Lovecraft’s “Arthur Jermyn”.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 8, no. 3 (31) (1997): 370-88.
Ralickas, Vivian. “”Cosmic Horror” and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18, no. 3 (71) (2007): 364-98.
Strombeck, Andrew. “Inhuman writing in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy.” Textual Practice 1, no. 1 (2019): 1-18.
Carroll, Siobhan. “The Terror and The Terroir: The Ecological Uncanny in New Weird Exploration Narratives.” Paradoxa 28 (2016): 67-89.
Ulstein, Gary. “Brave New Weird : Anthropocene Monsters in Jeff VanderMeer’s ‘The Southern Reach’.” Concentric – Literary and Cultural Studies 43.1 (2017): 71–96.
Religion in Popular Culture Lab 