Turning Away from the Edge of Madness: Kinesis, Nihilism, and Area X

Kaisa Kortekallio

In Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology, philosophers Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén make a radical claim: the modern Western form of subjective experience, with its separation of mind and matter, is only made possible by the energetic power of easily accessible fossil fuels. In their materialist analysis, experiencing oneself as an individual standing aloof from human and nonhuman others is a phenomenon arising from the general availability of cheap oil, and the particular economic and social relationalities cheap oil enables.¹

If we entertain this idea, then we must also admit that once the energetic base shifts from fossil fuels to something else, other patterns of subjective experience will replace fossil subjectivity. As the energetic ground shifts, everyday experience becomes suspect: what is there, in my habitual engagements with my surroundings, that repeats fossil patterns? What else is beginning to take shape? Could engagement with New Weird fiction allow me to feel the faint, rising rhythm of post-fossil experience? Maybe New Weird, through its unconventional treatment of nonhuman monstrosity, can allow me to unsettle some fossilized sediments of feeling.

Contemporary cognitive science and biology present human bodies as both nonconscious and nonhuman. Consciousness is grounded in and continuously shaped by a nonconscious buzz of metabolic and cognitive events. Some, such as microbial processes, are decidedly nonhuman. Our responses to the movements of other bodies (human and nonhuman, actual and fictional) also mostly take place on the nonconscious level. This mode of sense-making is known as kinesis.² In engaging with narratives involving movement, such as falling, you cannot help but respond, to simulate the movement in your mind as you would when witnessing actual falling. This kind of perceptual and sensorimotor simulation is usually taken for granted, both in everyday reading and in academic analyses, maybe because it is both very basic and very fleeting. However, attending to basic kinesic responses while reading fiction can help us access this level of experience as it unfolds. Careful practice can help bring some aspects of it to conscious access by slowing down and amplifying processes of kinesic sense-making.³

Narratologist Robyn Warhol argues that as our affective responses to narrative patterns become habitual, they participate in our expressive styles: in our behaviour, we echo the feelings and gestures familiar to us from fiction. In a very literal sense, fictional bodies live with us and shape our patterns of feeling and perception.⁴ These patterns often tie into the bodily styles of fictional characters—which, in turn, perform their choreographies according to their own conventions and constraints. In this bodily and partly nonconscious way, the conventions of contemporary fiction can be seen to participate in the production of modern—or fossil—subjectivity.

Horror fiction and Old Weird fiction contain fictional choreographies that have become highly conventionalized; they are fodder for creative variation in contemporary genre-conscious narratives. As New Weird repurposes these patterns, opportunities for experiential change open up for the reader. Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, especially, has been lauded as fiction that mixes influences to reimagine nonhuman otherness.⁵ Previous research has argued that the trilogy provides models for moving beyond the fear of the unknowable and “allows the reader to eventually experience radical alterity as something other than merely destructive.”⁶ Kinesic reading helps us zoom in on how this experientiality unfolds in the act of reading. I build on George J. Sieg’s notion of the “Gnostic victim” of horror to demonstrate how Annihilation, the first book of the trilogy, mobilizes and reconfigures the corporeal model of the Lovecraftian victim, and, in particular, the protagonist’s encounter with the monster. Analyzing this encounter shows how the novel estranges habitual patterns of feeling horror at the face of the unknowable, and perhaps nudges the reader toward a more-than-human organization of feeling.

Hovering on the Edge

Staging an encounter between the biologist-protagonist and the nonhuman unknowable, Annihilation presents a detailed choreography of sensorimotor and epistemic uncertainty. We can begin here, on the edge of a tidal pool, and trace the fictional figure of the biologist throughout the novel to the edge of human experience, beyond which we cannot follow her:

What I found when I finally stood there, hands on bent knees, peering down into that tidal pool, was a rare species of colossal starfish, six-armed, larger than a saucepan, that bled a dark gold color into the still water as if it were on fire. Most of us professionals eschewed its scientific name for the more apt “destroyer of worlds.” ... I had never seen a destroyer of worlds before, even in an aquarium, and it was so unexpected that I forgot about the slippery rock and, shifting my balance, almost fell, steadying myself with one arm propped against the edge of the tidal pool.

But the 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. When I finally wrenched my gaze from the starfish and stood again, I could not tell where the sky met the sea, whether I faced the water or the shore. I was completely adrift, and dislocated, and all I had to navigate by in that moment was the glowing beacon below me.⁷

The biologist has arrived on these slippery coastal rocks at the end of a drunken and disoriented evening. The passage makes it easy for the reader to enact the location, posture, and movements of the narrator’s body: we imagine her as standing, “hands on bent knees, peering down into that tidal pool” and then shifting her balance and almost falling, ending up perched awkwardly against the edge of the pool.

As we do this, we also enact the bodily feelings and cognitive trajectories woven into the narration. Seeing, the primary means of epistemic control, turns into futile staring that yields no result: “the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became.” The strangeness of the starfish grows to encompass nature and ecosystems, and “something in [the biologist’s] mood and in its dark glow” makes the starfish seem irreducible to scientific knowledge. The kinetic action in the passage further emphasizes this failure in understanding—the biologist fails to keep her balance, and she fails to make sense of the starfish.

In the last sentences of the passage, perception, emotion, and sense-making come together in an encompassing sense of disorientation that is mapped in spatial terms: the biologist is “completely adrift, and dislocated.” This fictional experience conveys the disorientation of not just a skull-bound mind but an entire lived body.

In the pages that immediately follow, the biologist recounts “a similar experience at a thousand times the magnitude”: the encounter with the monster that writes the spore-emitting words on the wall of the tower/tunnel.⁸ This encounter involves a psychedelic confusion of sensory impressions, starting with a “blue-green light [that] was like nothing I had experienced before [and] so overwhelmed my ability to comprehend shapes within it that I forced myself to switch from sight, to focus at first on reports from other senses.” This vision is accompanied by an “unearthly noise [that] had a texture and a weight, and with it came a burning smell, as of late fall leaves or like some vast and distant engine close to overheating.” In her retrospective commentary of this description, the biologist admits that the particular details might have been produced in the act of remembering: “It is difficult to tell what blanks my mind might be filling in just to remove the weight of so many unknowns.” In this way, the narrative leaves a door open to the irreducible mystery of the perceptual event while simultaneously providing very detailed and rich description.

Like the encounter with the starfish, the encounter with the monster brings the biologist to the limits of her perceptual and cognitive abilities. In her perception, the shape of the monster keeps changing, evoking optical illusions and impossible sensations. This perceptual uncertainty leaves her in an all-encompassing feeling of existential insecurity.

What can you do when your five senses are not enough? Because I still couldn’t truly see it here, any more than I had seen it under the microscope, and that’s what scared me the most. Why couldn’t I see it? In my mind, I stood over the starfish at Rock Bay, and the starfish grew and grew until it was not just the tidal pool but the world, and I was teetering on its rough, luminous surface, staring up at the night sky again, while the light of it flowed up and through me.⁹

The motif of staring without comprehension, combined with an unsteady balance characterized as “teetering,” is repeated again. The luminous starfish of the biologist’s imagination grows in size and sends its light to join the light of the night sky, leaving the biologist in between these two incomprehensible entities, permeated by light.

Reading through these fictional situations, I am prompted to enact uncomfortable bodily feelings of losing full vision and balance despite my efforts to maintain them. While the detail of description provides abundant sensory cues, some of them beautiful (blue-green light) and some frightening (burning smell, overheating engine), the abundant detail mainly serves to add complexity to the basic bodily feeling of failing to maintain sensorimotor control. And as sensorimotor control is precisely the bodily ability that, in enactivist theory and phenomenology of the body more broadly, maintains our sense of a stable self, the bodily feeling of losing that control serves to temporarily undermine coherent subjectivity itself.¹⁰

By evoking the destabilization of the lived body, the novel also effectively articulates more conceptual failures in control. Discussing this encounter on a conceptual level demonstrates how kinesis participates in our thematic interpretations of literature and thus adds a level of processual analysis to previous readings provided by Prendergast, Ulstein, and Idema. For the kinesic process, it makes no difference whether the fictional motions are perceived as literal or figurative—and as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson among others have argued, our embodied understanding of both concepts and language often follows a figurative logic.¹¹

Cognitivist Nihilism and the Gnostic victim

The two linked encounters with the starfish and the monster form a sublime scene, beginning from the mundane observations of the biologist but growing beyond them into cosmic existential dread. For a moment, it seems like the novel repeats a pattern familiar from an older style of weird and horror fiction—the protagonist finds the edge of her comprehension, and is forced to stay there, succumbing into madness. It seems there is no option other than a final fall from the edge—a kind of nihilism or annihilation of the perceiving rational subject. A closer look at both the rendering of the encounters and the notion of nihilism, however, shows that this would be a hasty conclusion.

A key text in the enactivist approach to cognition, The Embodied Mind, defines nihilism in Nietzschean terms: “the nihilistic predicament is the situation in which we know that our most cherished values are untenable, and yet we seem incapable of giving them up.”¹² In the specific context of contemporary cognitive science discussed by Varela and his coauthors, this predicament ties into the hopeless cognitivist attachment to consciousness and free will. Cognitivist nihilism involves both the realization that science does not support the existence of a central, conscious, masterful self, and the persistent inability to think of human experience without such a notion.¹³ The Embodied Mind presents nihilism as incapable of coming to terms with the groundlessness at the heart of both Western science and subjective experience: enactive cognition is metaphysically “groundless,” as it cannot be traced back to a stable foundation in either a pre-given world or a permanent self. Using robustly corporeal terms, Varela, Thompson and Rosch claim that a realization of this view

initially results in a sense of vertigo due to the collapse of what we had supposed to be sure and stable foundations. But rather than sweeping this sense of groundlessness under the rug by once again pitching the internal and the external against each other . . . we need to delve deeper into [it] and follow through all of its implications, philosophically and experientially.¹⁴

As discussed above, the “sense of groundlessness” as a bodily feeling, figures prominently in VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, and moments of characters losing their balance occur at thematically crucial moments. VanderMeer’s fiction thus provides opportunities for “following through” the implications of groundlessness in terms of both theme and readerly experience and move beyond nihilism.

Cognitivist nihilism becomes more tangible when we bring in the tradition of Weird fiction, and the work of H.P. Lovecraft in particular. George J. Sieg argues that Lovecraftian horror emerges from the experience of the victim’s perception and reason being violated. Lovecraft’s characters are “stripped down to being bare instruments of perception . . . impaled by an intrusive, inescapably bizarre alien otherness.”¹⁵ Sieg calls this mode of focusing on perception and conception “Gnostic horror,” and finds it throughout the history of horror fiction, ranging from classic vampire fiction to the Exorcist films. Moreover, he locates Gnostic horror in the perspective of the victim rather than in the presence or characteristics of the monster. The victim, whether the virginal heroine ravished by demonic forces or the pure-minded scientist driven mad by eldritch horrors, needs to be “innocent, as regards the horror.”¹⁶ In Sieg’s analysis, the innocence of Lovecraftian victims is tied to their supposedly secure position as rational, sane, white and Aryan subjects—forced to encounter a world of reason-defying miscegenated monstrosities. The Gnostic victim thus performs the cognitivist nihilist choreography of hovering at the edge of the unknowable, helplessly staring into the monstrous abyss.

Returning to Annihilation, we can ask whether the encounter of the biologist and the monster fits into the dualist horror schema characterized above as cognitivist nihilism and embodied in the Gnostic victim. We already saw how the scene destabilizes sensorimotor control and the reliability of perception. However, it seems to map rationality and subjectivity in a way that differs from the cognitivist nihilist pattern. The biologist continues to observe the monster even when her sight fails her, focusing at first “on reports from other senses.” Even when those reports appear as confusing and potentially misleading, as she admits that her mind might be making up the details, the narration retains a calmness detached from the perceptual confusion.

Moreover, the biologist rationally recognizes that the monster is an organism with strange but partially comprehensible abilities, and thus contextualizes the monster as part of the ecosystem of Area X. In this ecological mode of thought and experience, she accepts the unknowability of the monster. Thus, even when limited rationality might be necessary for the coherence or continuity of her subjectivity, total epistemic control is not—she does not succumb to madness. In this regard, the character of the biologist differs from the tradition of Gnostic victims.

Sieg concludes that for Lovecraft, “there was no solution or escape from the horror, as becoming the monster through deliberate identification is hardly an option for the extreme reductionist. For him, life is a conceptual nightmare with only the void of an empty consciousness as contrast.”¹⁷ But Sieg’s analysis inadvertently provides a conceptual way out of horror: relinquishing purity and becoming monstrous. Gry Ulstein’s and Finola Anne Prendergast’s analyses suggest that this is exactly what happens in the Southern Reach trilogy. As Ulstein puts it, the trilogy presents the monstrous as “a potentially emancipatory catalyst for starting to think in weird terms.”¹⁸

Weird terms, in the case of the biologist, can also be interpreted as ecological terms. Even before entering Area X, she is open to the notion of ecological interdependency—in fact, she cannot figure herself outside of such relationality. She figures herself as an expression of her environments. This anti-individualism marks her as not “innocent, as regards the horror,” as a proper Gnostic victim would be. In a move that finalizes the corporeal choreography of resisting cognitivist nihilism, she closes her eyes and turns away from the monster.

This move—literal to the nonconscious system of readerly response, literal and figural to a conscious critical mind—reconfigures the trope of the Gnostic victim. As the biologist turns away from the edge of madness, the reader performatively enacts the movement and accepts, on the level of nonconscious kinesic response at least, the cognitive reorientation entailed in it. The move now exists as a possible response to encountering monstrosity. The turn can by no means be read as a victory of the masterful human subject, as the monster still forces the biologist through an excruciating near-death experience, and after leaving the tunnel she is gradually transformed into something nonhuman. But even after all this, there is no complete annihilation of the perceiving subject: the biologist “[endures] beyond the endurable.”¹⁹ The narrative maintains a pragmatic, reporting tone, and the biologist goes on living and exploring an area that supports monstrous beings as part of its common ecology. The latter parts of the trilogy take this trajectory further, with Acceptance in particular focusing on life in a strange and dangerous ecosystem.

Conclusion: Groundlessness and Ecological Experience

Tom Idema connects the radical epistemological and existential uncertainty of the Southern Reach trilogy to the postmodernist novels of J.G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo, claiming that the trilogy shares with them “a discrepancy between an unrelenting desire for truth and authenticity, and a structural inability to find it, an inability that the protagonist can barely fathom.”²⁰ In contrast to the postmodernists, Idema argues, VanderMeer renders this discrepancy not only as a social and scientific condition but also as an environmental-posthumanist issue. He builds on contemporary research in ecology to claim that the continuous transmutations of ecosystems are philosophically just as radically unknowable as VanderMeer’s Area X. Groundlessness could thus be mapped as a particularly ecological feeling. I suggest that the sense of vertigo at the edge of weird ecologies marks an ongoing disintegration and reconfiguration of subjectivity. As the masterful, purely human subject quickly loses its viability as a lived condition, fiction begins to sketch and suggest new templates for experience.

The alternative to cognitivist nihilism, as presented in the Southern Reach trilogy, is not a harmonious return to nature. While certain passages of the biologist’s account of her life in Area X do echo Thoreau’s Walden, her attunement is jarred and her daily routines perverse. For decades, she postpones her transformation into monstrous form by inflicting pain on herself. Yet, in the hope that allowing that transformation to happen will open up new vistas of knowledge, she eventually gives in. As the monstrous is presented as something beyond human experience and language, the trilogy offers no first-person perspective on the transformation. Tracing the bodily movements of the biologist thus brings the embodied reader to another edge—not of reason and mastery, but of human forms of experience and narrative.

Notes