English Studies – Literary Option Bachelor
15 Credits
Spring Semester 2020 Magnus Nilsson
The Incomprehensible Scale of the
Anthropocene:
The Relevance of the Sublime in VanderMeer’s Annihilation
and Anthropocene Fiction
Table of Contents
Abstract..………...ii
1. Introduction………..1
2. The Problems of Anthropecene Fiction……….3
3. The Sublime………..9
3.1. The Burkean Sublime………...9
3.2. The Kantian Sublime………..11
3.3. The Anthropocene Sublime………13
4. VanderMeer’s Annihilation………...18
4.1. The Crawler……….19
4.1.1. The Crawler as a Metaphor………24
Conclusion………...27
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between the sublime and the Anthropocene, the period in earth’s geological history characterized by human impact upon the planet. As the genre of Anthropocene fiction, or climate fiction, has emerged in recent years, difficulties in defining the new genre as well as identifying useful tropes and forms within cli-fi novels has given rise to several proposed methods of understanding the Anthropocene. This essay examines the problems posed within Anthropocene fiction as well as the history of the concept of the sublime before examining Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation to find evidence of the relevance of the sublime within the Anthropocene.
1. Introduction
As the topic of climate change becomes increasingly relevant on a global scale, the concept of the Anthropocene has entered into many fields of discourse. The Anthropocene refers to the current geological epoch of the earth, in which humanity has significantly impacted and imposed its agency upon the planet and its physical environments. The term Anthropocene was introduced by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to “emphasize the central role of mankind in geology” (Crutzen and Stoermer 18). Thus, the conversation surrounding the Anthropocene often regards climate change and the measurable effects that human factors, such as pollution and industrialization, have had in causing it, although Anthropocene is not synonymous with climate change. The concept is applied not only to current issues, but also seeks to anticipate “humanity’s probable impacts on geophysical and biological systems for millennia to come,” as argued by Adam Trexler in Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a
Time of Climate Change (Trexler 1).
This attention to the Anthropocene and willingness to look towards the future is reflected within literature, as it has given rise to a genre of Anthropocene fiction, sometimes referred to as climate fiction or cli-fi. As with the emergence of any new genre, these literary works raise questions about the themes contained within Anthropecene fiction and the forms and tropes employed to address such themes. Trexler seeks to provide a potential outline of the genre and the challenges it faces while examining various methods for meeting those challenges. One challenge that Trexler identifies is that of navigating elements that are “impossible or tremendously difficult for us to understand about climate change” (Trexler 5) within a novel.
While Trexler does not propose a term for this incomprehensibility or vast scale of climate change found within the Anthropocene, many of his contemporaries assess the relevance of the concept of the sublime within an Anthropocene context and the cultural
works emerging from it. These theories interact with both historical notions of sublimity from the likes of Immanuel Kant as well as modern concepts of sublimity, arguing for their
relevance to contemporary Anthropocene fiction.
This essay will examine through textual analysis one such work of Anthropocene fiction, Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, and how it it describes the experience of the sublime within its context of climate change, science, and human agency, building upon the
arguments made by Trexler in his definition of the genre. Through this exploration of the novel, the relevance of the sublime to Anthropocene fiction and the methods VanderMeer employs to represent the scale and incomprehensibility innate to the Anthropocene will be investigated.
2. The Problems of Anthropocene Fiction
Before being able to argue the relevance of the sublime to Anthropocene fiction or the chosen object of Annihilation, it is necessary to understand the issues addressed by such fiction and the forms adopted during the representation of these issues in climate change fiction.
Trexler provides a helpful overview of the problems of Anthropocene fiction within a field that has so far struggled to provide an exact definition of or formula for the genre. He is interested in many issues found within Anthropocene novels as well as the era of the
Anthropocene beyond literary representation. These include truth and facticity as scientific realism and literary criticism provide different methods for understanding the Anthropocene, the role of place and time in connecting a reader to Anthropocene fiction, the role of human and non-human agency in the politics of the Anthropocene, and the interaction of economy with the Anthropocene. In Trexler’s discussion of each of these and evaluation of relevant climate change novels, there often arises a concept of incomprehensibility, of the
unknowable, and of the vast scale of climate change that looms over any author endeavoring to capture the Anthropocene within a novel. He asserts that “the very scale of climate change challenges people’s capacity to understand it” (Trexler 75), and further concludes that climate change “defies scales from local places to global spaces” (273). As will be discussed later, the concept of scale is one central to the definition of the sublime.
This problem of scale is relevant to the discussion of Anthropocene fiction as it demands new methods of representation from the genre. A post-modernist focus on the individual is insufficient to properly represent the scale of climate change as it affects the entire global population and determines the future of humanity itself as it continues to impact the earth’s geological processes. Just as a single person recycling a water bottle is insufficient to halt the creeping effects of climate change, so is a “‘literary novel’ about contemporary
society…set in bourgeois spaces” insufficient to represent the “different scales of climate change” (Trexler 78).
Trexler identifies one method of representing this impossible scale in the form of the deluge narrative, a type of climate disaster that he deems most effective in granting a sense of “epic scale, moral judgment, terror, and end of time” (86), themes of significant relevance to the sublime. He also discusses how the scale of the process of impacting the planet through “industrialization, mass transport, global mining efforts, and so on far exceeds individual agency” (Trexler 58) requiring a new conceptualization of agency through actor network theory. Beyond place and truth, the scale of the Anthropocene also affects how politics should be represented in a novel, as “climate change is a global problem and will require international solutions” (Trexler 124), rendering a focus on nations or locales ineffective. The problem of scale is ultimately one of comprehensibility, as the human mind struggles to grasp the scope of climate change that extends so far beyond them, and thus it makes itself relevant to the other issues and forms of Anthropocene fiction, as novelists attempt to capture a “comprehensible environmental context [that] may be slipping out of reach forever” (Trexler 215).
Other individuals have proposed methods that may aid in making the processes of climate change within the Anthropocene “comprehensible to human imagination” (Trexler 5). Addressing Anthropocene fiction as laid out within Trexler’s analysis, Marco Caracciolo et al. in their paper “Metaphorical patterns in Anthropocene Fiction” investigate the role of metaphorical language in “bridging large-scale processes which are difficult to conceptualize with human embodied experience” (Caracciolo et al. 13). They assert that the “intangibility of climate change calls for metaphorical language that is able to translate scientific models into concrete, affect-laden imagery” (Caracciolo et al. 1)—e.g., a melting ice cream cone, in which the ice cream is edited to look like the earth, and thus represent global warming—
employing George Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory. As they argue, metaphors enable perspective-changing, allowing the reader to perceive a topic from a different conceptual space, a technique of significant potential value within a genre that struggles to represent global climate change in a comprehensible way to the individual. In examining three different Anthropocene fiction novels, they argue that “metaphor can challenge dualistic distinctions— for instance, between human agents and supposedly inert human objects—that are built into the language itself” (Caracciolo et al. 3). In this way, metaphors enable a previously
incomprehensible idea to be comprehended and describe the indescribable, replacing that which is too broad to grasp with something within the reach of human understanding.
The methods of human understanding are a topic of interest to Axel Goodbody in his paper “Risk, Denial and Narrative Form in Climate Change Fiction: Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour and Ilija Trojanow’s Melting Ice,” as he considers climate change novels to be an important “mechanism through which risk is perceived” (2), equating it to his field of cultural risk study. He compares the methods with which the media discusses climate change to the methods employed in Anthropocene fiction, interested in the public response to these sources, and notes that in the media, “attention was often directed to local happenings and the past—making it difficult for readers to think in terms of the scales of time and space needed to conceptualise climate change” (Goodbody 6)—the media was failing to represent climate change in a comprehensible manner to its audience, instead reducing the scale. In analyzing Kingsolver’s climate fiction novel Flight Behaviour, he notes the use of the Bildungsroman, which he defines as the “narrative of an individual’s awakening to environmental risk and simultaneous realisation of their potential as an active member of society” (Goodbody 11), an older form of the novel and an individual-based concept that Trexler would likely argue fails to account for the true scale of climate change, as it does not account for the agency of things beyond the human. Nevertheless, the protagonist of the novel is able to understand her
experience as “part of a broader picture of change” (Goodbody 10), a feat that, according to Goodbody, has not been accomplished by media representations of climate change to the public. Goodbody also addresses other literary strategies such as analogy and satire in his analysis, although his approach is more general to determine what elements of narratology can be used in Anthropocene fiction rather than arguing for the particular effectiveness of any one of them. He does claim, however, that there exists across his selection of Anthropocene fiction texts, “structural metaphors and images, many of them rich in cultural tradition, through which climate change is brought closer to the reader” (Goodbody 19), an assertion that is subtantiated more convincingly by Caracciolo et al. previously.
Following Goodbody’s interest in the individual and public reception of messages of climate change, Sabine Wilke examines the Anthropocene from a perspective of gender, race, and postcolonialism in her paper “Anthropocenic Poetics: Ethics and Aesthetics in a New Geological Age.” In assessing the effects of the Anthropocene on these areas of society, Wilke discusses the relation between human and nonhuman objects, asserting that “not only do humans shape the world of the objects, but that all relations between humans and
nonhumans alter the parties involved” (Wilke 68). She imagines a “multi-sensory
dimensional response to landscape that is not automatically enveloped in the paradigm of subjectivity” (Wilke 69), seeking to bring the experience and understanding of the
Anthropocene beyond the faculties of an individual. How she proposes to do so is not as nicely defined as her goal, but she claims that “in the Anthropocene human emotions can be attributed to the environment and that people suffer from environmental degradation” (Wilke 71-72), and suggests that poetry would be an effective means of representing this, although she offers no examples. Her focus on the the relation between human emotions and the environment is intriguing, teasing at a bridge between aesthetics and actor network theory concerned with nonhuman agency, an idea that could be difficult to comprehend—perhaps it
is unsurprising, therefore, that she struggles to convincingly argue a relevant connection between the two.
Joyce Chaplin discusses a similar concept to Wilke, that is, of the relation between human and nonhuman objects, in a more thorough manner within her paper “Can the
Nonhuman Speak?: Breaking the Chain of Being in the Anthropocene.” In a matter central to agency, she asks “What are we in comparison to the rest of the natural world? More
specifically, do we have powers that other parts of nature lack, in any significant way?” (Chaplin 511). The answers to such questions could have a dramatic impact on the human ability to comprehend the Anthropocene world—humanity has long made sense of the world in reference to itself, a trend that has only grown in post-modernism, and understanding the scale of a concept that operates with no regard for the individual powers could prove an impossible feat. Chaplin argues for moving away from an anthropocenric view of non-human nature and attempts to break down the idea that humans have “a distinctive if not unique ability to formulate and analyze ideas,” an ability that “not only separates them from the rest of the world but signifies their superiority over it” (Chaplin 521). She discusses the
incomprehensibility of the Anthropocene, which she describes as
typically presented as a problem of scale, of the immensity of the human
transformation of an entire planet and of their Great Acceleration of otherwise glacial geologic time. The element of scale is assumed to be unprecedented, therefore hard for humanity to confront. Despite that, there is a hope that sustained mental effort will reduce the problem to comprehensibility—enough pondering will break the dilemma into understandable units of analysis, and then we will be in the reassuring pursuit of a solution. (Chaplin 522)
This understanding of what is incomprehensible in the Anthropocene fits neatly into the recurring theme of scale within Trexler’s analysis, but it is not Chaplin’s main focus. Instead,
she is interested in pursuing the idea that “nonhuman animals may have ideas which humans cannot understand,” an idea that “presents a fundamental challenge to the great chain of being. In other words, what the human mind struggles to comprehend more than the vast scale of climate change are nonhuman ideas, far outside the bounds of human thinking. This, unlike scale, cannot be portioned down, as its very nature, not its magnitude, is what makes it incomprehensible. Chaplin relates this struggle to the Burkean sublime, which concerns the “paradoxical allure of something beyond human control, whose impact could not be
rationally defined” (Chaplin 525). And thus, a convenient bridge between incomprehensibility and the sublime is presented.
As seen through these varying investigations of the Anthropocene, a central problem is representing the scale of climate change and navigating the incomprehensibility of a concept that lies beyond human conception not only due to its scale, but to its very nature as resistant to human agency and thinking. One method of navigating these issues is through the concept of the sublime.
3. The Sublime
The idea of the sublime relates chiefly to the discourse of aesthetics, dating back to the classic Greek theorist Longinus. However, it wasn’t until the mid-18th century that it began to receive significant attention among literary theorists and critics, leading to introduction of a concept now known as the Kantian sublime. This discussion of sublimity occurred as part of the Romantic tradition, and therefore fell out of favor significantly with the introduction of Modernism. Postmodern theorists such as Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, and Jean-François Lyotard revisited the topic, but it has not received the same attention in contemporary critique that it enjoyed during the 18th and 19th centuries. In understanding the sublime, it is helpful to break it down into the main conceptualizations of it that will be relevant to Anthropocene fiction and analyzing VanderMeer’s Annihilation.
3.1. The Burkean Sublime
Edmund Burke was one of the first to write on the topic of the sublime since it fell forgotten after the time of Longinus, predating Kant and his notion of the sublime that would become the standard for discussing the sublime in later years. As Chaplin investigates the chain of being and the nonhuman, she becomes particularly interested in the Burkean sublime. She summarizes it,
Things seem sublime because they provoke sensations of privation, desolation, suddenness, irregular succession, or obscurity. Any apprehension of what is sublime is therefore too confused and unpredictable to elicit clear thought of any kind, including moral thought. (Chaplin 526)
Burke’s emphasis on the muddledness of thoughts is of interest to Chaplin as it relates neatly to her proposal of nonhuman ideas, or thoughts from nonhuman animals, which would surely be incomprehensible to humans. But Burke’s own definition of the sublime in his collection of writings A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful is much broader than Chaplin’s summarization, as Burke declares:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (Burke 36)
This definition could be applied in numerous ways to the Anthropocene and to the problems of Anthropocene fiction—pain, danger, and terror can all be found within representations of climate change, as climate disasters bring about destruction globally, be it through a deluge as Trexler prefers, a drought creating a widespread famine, or any other number of possible climate-related catastrophes. Some may even argue that climate anxiety, or fear regarding the environmental future of the earth and its effect on humanity, is a source of terror.
Burke also relates his idea of sublimity to the concepts of vastness and infinity, as he identifies the ways in which “greatness of dimension, vastness of extent, or quantity, has the most striking effect” (Burke 66), an emphasis of great relevance to the incomprehensible scale of climate change that is represented in Anthropocene fiction.
Also central to the Burkean sublime is the “associated idea of terror” (Burke 121), an association allowed by distance rather than a direct and impending terror. In this sense, the sublime resides in the mind and in the ability to appreciate such a feeling of pain or terror, as one must be able to delight in it. In the context of the Anthropocene, these could be equated to reading Anthropocene fiction depicting terrible climate events, or even witnessing such events on the news or from a distance, although if it were to pose an imminent danger—if the observer was not an observer but a participant, about to be drowned in a deluge or starve from a famine—it cannot be sublime. This delineation is one that is carried through to the Kantian sublime, as Kant pursues the sublime using similar notions to Burke’s but with much more depth.
3.2. The Kantian Sublime
Immanuel Kant’s definition of the sublime resides in two variants: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. Beginning with the mathematically sublime in his
Critique of the Power of Judgment, he introduces the notion of the absolutely great, or that
which is “great beyond all comparison” (Critique 132), in both multitude and magnitude. According to Kant, the mathematical sublime is that “which even to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses” (Critique 134). Trexler’s claim that “the very scale of climate change challenges people’s capacity to understand it” (75) fits perfectly with this understanding of the sublime, as it is so vast that it becomes unthinkable, incomprehensible.
The alternative form of the Kantian sublime is the dynamically sublime, which he defines as “nature considered in aesthetic judgment as a power that has no dominion over us” (Critique 143). It must incite fear, as fear implies the inability of the individual to overcome that which is fearful, but Kant maintains a similar qualifier as Burke does:
We can, however, consider an object as fearful without being afraid of it, if, namely, we judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case in which we might wish to resist it and think that in that case all resistance would be completely futile. (Critique 144)
This distance from the danger is again essential in defining the sublime, as “someone who is afraid can no more judge about the sublime in nature than someone who is in the grip of inclination and appetite can judge about the beautiful” (Critique 144). Sublimity lies once again, then, in distance from the danger, as could be represented in forms such as the climate fiction novel.
However, Kant makes a further distinction for the qualification of the sublime. According to him, the sublime will cause an individual to recognize their “physical
powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of it and a superiority over nature” (Critique 145), implying a definitive human agency over nonhuman objects. This qualification complicates the association of the Kantian sublime with the Anthropocene, as a significant problem within the Anthropocene and the genre of
Anthropocene fiction is that of nonhuman agency and the insufficiency of a focus on humanity or the individual to encompass the full breadth of climate change.
Another characteristic of the Kantian sublime is that it is closely intertwined with the concept of beauty, as the sublime is to be considered a form of negative beauty, existing as an equal opposition to beauty. As Kant puts it in his further writings Observations on the
Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings, “the night is sublime, the day is
beautiful” (Observations 16). Postmodern theory has veered away from assessments of beauty, as it is a markedly Romantic fixation, perhaps complicating the application of the Kantian sublime to contemporary literature. At the very least, the notion of sublimity and beauty as a dichotomy becomes less appealing in the Anthropocene, marked by the destructive impacts of humanity on the planet rather than the untouched beauty of nature.
Despite these potential difficulties, there are theorists that argue for the relevance of the Kantian sublime in contemporary literature. Emily Brady discusses in great detail the role of the aesthetic appreciation of nature and the Kantian sublime in her paper “Reassessing Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature in the Kantian Sublime.” One of the aspects she chooses to focus on is Kant’s understanding of the beautiful form as compared to the sublime
formlessness, as of disorder and immeasurability. She asserts:
That Kant is so careful to distinguish beautiful form from sublime formlessness suggests the indispensable role played by formlessness in our response. Our response is essentially shaped by the way the appearance of formlessness engages yet finally overwhelms imagination. (Reassessing 97)
This overwhelming of imagination produced by formlessness, she argues, allows people to “assign a central casual role to the features of natural objects that give the impression of formlessness” (Reassessing 97), of value in examining the effect of objects upon mankind. Here is seen, then, a potential relevance of the Kantian sublime to the Anthropocene and its objects expressing agency over humanity.
While Brady makes several compelling arguments in her essay about the relevance of the Kantian sublime to contemporary literary studies, she is ultimately more concerned with aesthetics and morality than that which would be significantly useful to navigating the Anthropocene. The difficulty of relating a theory of aesthetics and morals to issues of a new and modern genre and a newly defined epoch give rise, therefore, to new understandings of the sublime.
3.3. The Anthropocene Sublime
Although Kant is vital to understanding the concept of the sublime, there are many iterations of the sublime beyond his theories and interests. Increasingly more researchers seem to be interested in the concept of the sublime as it relates to the Anthropocene and interact with the sublime in their own ways, distinct from the Kantian sublime.
In her book The Sublime in Modern Philosophy, Brady expands beyond the Kantian sublime, offering an overview of the history of the sublime both prior to and following Kant’s theories. After moving through its historic meanings and applications, she concludes with a discussion of what she refers to as the environmental sublime. She addresses the role of the sublime through the lens of climate change, stating:
The massive scales involved in current and future effects, such as mass extinctions, extreme weather events, and displacement of human communities, are overwhelming and disturbing, yet we also observe the impressive adaptive capacities of some
a more tragic view, these considerations may be outweighed by an apocalyptic sense of doom – a sense in which we cannot change history – humanity having failed to act soon enough, and the terrible consequences that will follow, now and into the future. (The Sublime 186-187).
In this description, she brings the Burkean and Kantian ideas of vastness and terror into the discussion of the sublime and climate change, but also introduces a new notion—doom—that is not present in the historical definitions of the sublime. She associates this doom with a failure to act and an inability to change its course, rejecting the Kantian notion of human superiority and agency over a sublime object or experience, and departing from both the Burkean and Kantian assumptions that sublimity requires distance from the sublime. In the Anthropocene, the individual lives surrounded by climate change and ever-building evidence of the unsustainability of their society, directly endangered by it.
In a similar method to Brady, Christopher Hitt’s paper “Toward an Ecological Sublime” explores the many theories of the sublime and relates them to ecology, asserting that there has been a “scholarly neglect on the part of ecocriticism to interrogate the discourse of the sublime” and argues that the sublime “offers a unique opportunity for the realization of a new, more responsible perspective on our relationship with the natural environment” (Hitt 605). Predating the introduction of the term Anthropocene by just one year, Hitt’s association of human responsibility towards and relationship with the environment seems to be right on time with the wave of Anthropocene theory and relation to the sublime that have followed in the past two decades. His definition of the sublime as “human beings’ encounters with a nonhuman world whose power ultimately exceeds theirs” (Hitt 609) mirrors the
Anthropocene problems of the scale, incomprehensibility, and agency of climate change and the environment. In the human grapple with this lack of agency or comprehension, Hitt offers this summary:
The unfathomable otherness of nature unnerves us, and the idea that we are somehow part of this alien entity shocks us. Hence we devise ways to circumvent, deny, escape, or overcome it. Such efforts, indeed, constitute the story of the conventional sublime, a story which describes the validation of the individual through an act of
transcendence in which the external world is domesticated, conquered, or erased. (Hitt 611).
The focus on the individual experience of conquering the eternal world is reminiscent of Goodbody’s appraisal of the narrative of the Bildungsroman as an effective means of representing the Anthropocene: it is undeniably more comfortable to narrow the scope to an individual, one that may even overcome their circumstances and emerge victorious over the environment attempting to exert its agency, than it is to conceptualize an Anthropocene world in which the scale of climate change is so vast that no individual can conquer it and so far outside the human experience that no individual can comprehend it. But as Hitt argues, “the rapidly increasing impact of technology on the world has only heightened the urgency of the need to reconsider the sublime” (618). The Anthropocene, defined by humanity’s impact on the world, demands a form capable of representing the terror of infinity and the
powerlessness of an individual, and that form is the sublime. He asserts that “the sublime is not disappearing along with the disapperance of wild nature; its grounds are merely shifting” (Hitt 619), shifting towards a sublime experience represented in Anthropocene fiction in the likes of novels such as Annihilation.
Other theorists adopt the sublime into their understanding of the Anthropocene. Eu Jin Chua similarly argues the role of the sublime in navigating modern ecology in “Ecological Aesthetics—With or Without the Sublime?”, naming it as “an important component in Kant’s attempt to bridge science and ethics via an aesthetic theory” (53). This bridge is central to the issues of the Anthropocene, as neither scientific realism nor literary criticism are equipped to
address climate change on their own, as argued by Trexler. However, Chua problematizes many of the ways Hitt interprets Kant’s writings on the sublime, even calling it a “rather forced reading” arguing that Kant is concerned only with the human experience and that the “external objects of the non-human world are a non-concern” (Chua 55). By this estimation, the Kantian sublime is not so relevant to the current issue of climate change and its agency within the Anthropocene. Chua further points out that Kant’s estimation of the sublime is related to pleasure, a fact overlooked by Hitt, and ultimately questions whether aesthetic beauty would be more useful to ecology than the sublime would. However, his critique focuses only on the arguments of Hitt and the Kantian definition of the sublime, not allowing for a new, redefined, Anthropocene sublime that may contain such elements as doom and be devoid of pleasure or human agency.
If the sublime is carried beyond its Kantian roots, it becomes more applicable to the Anthropocene. In “Saying Climate Change: Ethics of the Sublime and the Problem of Representation,” Maggie Kainulainen proposes the sublime as an alternative to the current method of considering climate change, which “is hydra-headed, referring as it does to
processes, agents and actors, outcomes and effects, feedback loops, and national and cultural responses, making it possible to interpret and imagine climate change in very different ways” (110) and insufficient to represent the full scale of climate change. Her appreciation of the sublime as relevant to climate change comes from this focus on scale as well as
incomprehensibility, as she easily relates the sublime to climate change:
The sublime, in all its theorizations, is marked by an event or encounter with something so vast that it escapes all attempts to apprehend it fully. Climate change exceeds boundaries by forcing us to think of time beyond the human scale, to take seriously the agency of nonhuman actors, and it poses a direct and terrible threat to human livelihood and lives. (Kainulainen 111)
With these simple statements, it becomes difficult to argue against the relevance of the sublime to the Anthropocene and its problems, as she uses a broad definition that is not weighed down by the qualifications of 18th century theorists.
Gene Ray examines a similar implementation of the sublime in “Terror and the Sublime in the So-Called Anthropocene,” arguing that the problems of the Anthropocene and anxieties about climate change and extinction are entering politics—an important area of the Anthropocene, according to Trexler—but that leaders of governments on a global level are failing to adjust their “organizing logics that determine the dominance of capitalist economy over politics,” which only serves to “intensify terror as it approaches unknown social, as well as ecological, tipping points” (8). He discusses the notion of the Anthropocene sublime as proposed by his contemporaries and relates it to social terror, not asserting the relevance of the sublime as emphatically as some others, but instead identifying it as a “socially mediated and variable subjective response” (Ray 17) that likely has some role to play in the
Anthropocene.
The sublime Anthropocene is argued for much more strongly by Byron Williston, one of the contemporaries that Ray discusses, in his paper “The Sublime Anthropocene” as he is deeply invested in the relevance of Kant’s sublime in characterizing the Anthropocene as a “uniquely sublime experience in the history of our species” (171). He argues that
“experienced sublimely, nature’s dramas can no longer be apprehended without also
reflecting on considerations of global and intergenerational justice” (Williston 169), asserting the importance of the sublime in navigating areas such as economy and politics, as are
pointedly relevant to Trexler’s summation of the Anthropocene.
While there may not be a singular explanation for what the sublime looks like within the Anthropocene, it is certainly a topic of extensive discussion, and relevant to any reading of works within Anthropocene fiction.
4. VanderMeer’s Annihilation
With such a thorough understanding of the context of the sublime within the Anthropocene and Anthropocene ficition, attention can be turned to a singular object for analysis. A futuristic climate fiction novel, Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation presents a prime example of Anthropocene fiction in a current and popular context. In addition to being adapted into a Netflix film, it is also but the first installment in the three-part Southern Reach Trilogy. The novel is set in an unspecified time in the future, following what is presumably some form of climate disaster, although this too is left to the reader to hypothesize. It follows a group of nameless scientists—an anthropologist, a surveyor, a psychologist, and a biologist—who are sent to study Area X, a region void and defiant of human civilization and impact. It presents a mystery, a challenge that the group of scientists is the twelfth group to be sent to investigate, as each previous expedition has failed under varying circumstances and the knowledge of the area remains elusive.
As the group arrives and begins their task of mapping the terrain and recording their observations of Area X, they encounter an underground structure unmarked on the maps from the previous expeditions. It extends deep underground, in what the biologist, who also serves as the narrator, describes as a tower, but the others describe as a tunnel, and its walls are marked with a line of rambling, neverending text, seemingly alive with millions of tiny spore-producing organisms. It becomes evident that these words have been written, and continue to be written, by some form of creature which is given the name of the Crawler based on the slug-like residue it leaves behind as the tunnel descends deeper into the earth and the living words grow brighter and fresher. The words on the wall and the Crawler become a topic of fascination for the biologist, who finds herself inexplicably drawn towards the tunnel and its mysteries.
Soon after the discovery of the tunnel, however, more mysteries defying explanation present themselves, as disappearances, mental breaks, strange afflictions, and horrifying creatures plague the group until the only survivor is the biologist, left alone with no answers and a dying need to understand the Crawler and the endless discrepancies of Area X.
The novel interacts significantly with the ideas of incomprehensibility and scale as the biologist attempts to understand Area X from the perspective of scientific realism. The
experiences of the biologist as she explores Area X and its enigmatic forces could be described as sublime. Among the many examples within the novel representing sublimity, one of particular noteworthiness is the Crawler, as the ultimately sublime being itself. 4.1. The Crawler
Having been oriented with the concept of the Anthropocene sublime, the Crawler presents itself as a purely sublime experience to the biologist. It embodies both the vastness and incomprehensibility identified by Trexler as a problem of the Anthropocene and by Burke, Kant, and many others as fundamental elements of the sublime. When the biologist finally encounters the Crawler, she is wholly unable to comprehend it. This lack of
comprehension refers not only to the ability of her human mind to understand it, but also the the failure of her senses to even perceive it. She declares “I could not begin to understand what I was looking at and even now I have to work hard to pull it together from the fragments. It is difficult to tell what blanks my mind might be filling in just to remove the weight of so many unknowns” (VanderMeer 175-176). She is attempting to break down what her senses are perceiving in order to rationalize it, to exert some semblance of agency and superiority over it, but it is entirely beyond her capacity to know. The Crawler resists all attempts at comprehension, demanding the “multi-sensory dimensional response” (Wilke 69) that Wilke postulates but fails to provide a path to. It cannot be broken “into understandable units of analysis” (Chaplin 512), but exists entirely beyond human conceptualization. As a
biologist, the protagonist’s primary objective is to understand the Crawler, but such a feat is impossible.
The scale of the Crawler reaches the infinite, as described in the Burkean sublime, past even the normal bounds of human perception:
Then it became an overwhelming hugeness in my battered vision, seeming to rise and keep rising as it leapt toward me. The shape spread until it was even where it was not, or should not have been. It seemed now more like a kind of obstacle or wall or thick closed door blocking the stairs. Not a wall of light—gold, blue, green, existing in some other spectrum—but a wall of flesh that resembled light…an impression of living things lazily floating in the air around it like soft tadpoles, but at the limits of my vision so I could not tell if this was akin to those floating dark motes that are tricks of the eye, that do not exist” (VanderMeer 176-177).
The italicizations included by VanderMeer in this passage further assert the sublimity of the Crawler, as the hugeness regards its scale, which expands into the infinite into “where it was not, or should not have been,” embodying a true impossibility and the greatest form of the mathematical sublime that Kant could possibly hope for. Its incomprehensibility reaches the point that the biologist questions its existence, and her language to describe it fails, as its flesh resembles light without being light, a concept far beyond the imagination of most human minds.
As the biologist encounters the Crawler, she describes the experience as “the most beautiful, the most terrible thing I might ever experience,” (Vandermeer 178). Such a description corresponds directly to Kant’s presentation of the sublime as an opposite of beauty. The experience is simultaneously beautiful and terrible, and despite the pain she experiences in being paralyzed in place, there is still derivable pleasure from it. This
subject, in order for the sublime to exist, and fits more with the doom and terror narratives of the Anthropocene sublime proposed by Brady.
With every description of the experience, the biologist’s encounter with the Crawler is solidifed as the sublime. She recognizes its nonhuman animal intelligence, its ideas and concepts beyond that of the human mind as Chaplin proposes, as the biologist describes it:
A complex, unique, intricate, awe-inspiring, dangerous organism. It might be
inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me. (VanderMeer 179)
She simultaneously recognizes herself as incapable of understanding the nonhuman thoughts and intentions of the Crawler while insisting on applying her own agency to it, offering her own theories of camouflage and methods of projecting thoughts to attempt to explain what is completely inexplicable. Her science fails her, the logic of scientific realism outplayed by a creature that does not submit to human interpretation and makes painfully obvious the human bias present in the arrogant assumption that facts are facts and logic is inarguable. Her agency is stripped from her by the Crawler as she cannot impose her lens of scientific reasoning and biological explanation upon it, despite her attempts to understand, categorize, and classify.
She later resigns herself to this lack of agency, this inability to impose her
understanding on the Crawler and Area X as a whole and embraces the sublimity, describing the “sense of the uncanny to the landscape because of the narcissism of our human gaze” (VanderMeer 192).
The usage of the term of the uncanny is interesting, as it is often associated with the sublime, and some theorists have argued that the uncanny is a more useful tool in
understanding the Anthropocene than the sublime, as David Farrier in his writing “Deep Time’s Uncanny Future Is Full of Ghostly Human Traces” declares “the ‘sublime’ is not the right way to characterise our visceral response to these phenomena. The ‘uncanny’ might serve us better” (Deep Time), although he fails to provide an explanation of why such a term is superior to the sublime. This assertion of his as is used as the grounds by Hannah Stark et al. to write their essay “Introduction: Uncanny Objects in the Anthropocene,” but as they merely accept the statement without discussion of the uncanny compared to the sublime, it is not persuasive in relocating the focus of this reading of Annihilation away from the sublime. Nevertheless, it could be said that the uncanny and the sublime are related, as both could be attached to the idea of the unknowable, and in that way, it is almost as if the biologist describes her own experience as sublime. This relation could be used as a grounds to
investigate the uncanny within the Anthropocene, as well as providing an alternative term or theory to the sublime while addressing many of the same issues.
The uncanny is also mentioned in relation to Annihilation by Gözde Ersoy in
“Crossing the Boundaries of the Unknown With Jeff VanderMeer: The Monstrous Fantastic and ‘Abcanny’ in Annihilation,” although she replaces it instead with the term abcanny, or “a blend of two dynamic emotions: the familiar horror and the monstrous” (Ersoy 255). The abcanny relates to “inescapable aspects of the human condition, and…familiar horror” (Ersoy 259), ideas found within concepts of the sublime as well. The choice to examine the uncanny in her essay comes then from a focus on the weird and eery, rather than a matter of aesthetics or agency, as discussed by those interested in placing the sublime into the context of the Anthropocene. However, the Crawler could easily be identified as a monster, and the elements of the abcanny explored by Ersoy are not far from the sublime, merely aimed in a
different direction. The genre of weird literature is a relatively new one, and therefore not the subject of as much analysis as the sublime or the larger Anthropocene fiction, but another writer, Gry Ulstein, identifies Annihilation as belonging to the weird genre within her paper “Brave New Weird: Anthropocene Monsters in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach.” Ulstein discusses in depth the weirdness of Annihilation and its monsters, including the Crawler, and the significance of its monstrosity that “loses some of its horror” (88) as “the biologist realizes that she is terrified of the Crawler, yet simultaneously has favorable
feelings towards [it]” (90). The simultaneity of terror and favorable feelings is reminiscent of the sublime and its negative beauty, and it is possible that the topic monstrosity could be related to the sublime.
The phrasing of “narcissism of the human gaze” used by the biologist in the second part of the sentence brings the discussion back to the sublime, as it relates once more to the erasure of the deep self from the narrative of the Anthropocene, as not only the individual perspective, but the human perspective, becomes no longer superior to the Crawler and the agency of climate change in the Anthropocene, but instead one agent in a larger network. The hierarchy is erased, a departure from the Kantian sublime, but such a departure is necessary in conceptualizing the sublime within the Anthropocene. The biologist sacrifices her sense of importance and submits to the sublimity of her experience, writing “I am just the biologist; I don’t require any of this to have a deeper meaning” (VanderMeer 192). The lack of a search for a deeper meaning removes much of the argument of morality that is so often incorporated into the Burkean and Kantian sublime, substantiating a proposal of a new sublime
characterized by pain, terror, incomprehensibility, and even beauty, but without the superiority of the human mind and agency, need for distance from danger, and ultimately human focus of the historical sublime.
The sublime as experienced by the biologist in Annihilation may not adhere to all traditional understandings of the term, but its breaks from these constructs are precisely what make it useful and relevant to the Anthropocene. Within Anthropocene fiction, climate change may be limited to representation, but it is a danger that exists beyond the bounds of the novel, and Anthropocene fiction is but one way of conveying the urgency and scale of climate change to an audience that is living amongst the real effects of climate change. As the media fails to produce a satisfactory sense of doom or terror in the public, examined by Goodbody, the Crawler provides a sublime experience to be understood by the reader. It is a sublime truer to life, as it offers no safety, no assurance of triumph, but instead the terror and incomprehensibility that can be found in the current climate crisis and that continues to be predicted within the Anthropocene epoch.
4.1.1. The Crawler as a Metaphor
In this way, the Crawler serves not only as a sublime experience for the biologist, but as a larger metaphor for climate change. While there are other occurrences that could be related to the sublime within Annihilation, the Crawler is consistent throughout. It is theorized about long before it is seen, as the biologist ponders “what role did the Crawler serve?...Either the Crawler was an emissary of the Tower or the Crawler had originally existed independent from it and came into its orbit later” (VanderMeer 91), just as scientists have identified and discussed climate change, giving it names such as global warming and speculating about its causes and effects. The following sentence in the passage further illustrates the Crawler as a metaphor for climate change: “But without the damned missing sample of the Tower wall, I couldn’t really begin to guess” (VanderMeer 92). Just as the biologist is missing the piece to the Crawler puzzle, humanity is missing the piece to the climate change puzzle, faced with comprehending something outside of the human
offering some clue into what the future of the Anthropocene holds and providing some means of understanding what is otherwise beyond society’s grasp. The Crawler as a metaphor for climate change is a translation of a “scientific model[] into concrete, affect-laden imagery” (Caracciolo et al. 1), the translation of the climate change model into a creature beyond comprehension.
It may seem counterproductive to present a sublime object as a metaphor, as
metaphors are intended to make more accessible concepts that are “difficult to conceptualize with human embodied experience” (Caracciolo et al. 13), and the sublime, as seen in the Crawler, defies all conceptualization. However, the experience of the biologist is not that of the reader; the reader is presented with a description of the indescribable, and is not
endangered by the imminent danger the Crawler presents to the biologist. In this way, Anthropocene fiction, or at least Annihilation, is able to condense an infinite concept into a form digestible by the human mind, as metaphor bridges the gap between
incomprehensibility and embodied experience within the novel, and representation in the form of the novel bridges the gap between between incomprehensiblity and embodied experience in the larger world of the Anthropocene that all of humanity currently inhabits.
In reflecting on her knowledge of the Crawler, the biologist qualifies her theories with the statement, “I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, innacurate, useless. If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish” (Vandermeer 192-193). In addition to embodying the incomprensibility that is characteristic of the sublime that is found in the Crawler and Area X, it serves as a convenient metaphor for the
relationship between contemporary scientists and climate change: in addressing climate change and looking toward the future, humanity’s speculation is incomplete, inexact,
Anthropocene, but it, too, is incomplete, inexact, innacurate. Trexler, in seeking to define Anthropocene fiction, is looking at useless instruments and broken methodology, cognizant of his selfish motivations and looking for which questions to ask, just as all the other theorists negotiating with the Anthropocene and the sublime are. Within Annihilation, the Crawler and the biologist’s encounter with it truly serves as complete metaphor for incomprehensibility and scale of climate change within the Anthropocene and humanity’s struggle to navigate it.
The book closes with the biologist relating, “observing all of this has quelled the last ashes of the burning compulsion I had to know everything…anything…and in its place remains the knowledge that the brightness is not done with me” (VanderMeer 194). This brings the sublime back to the concept of agency, asserting that what is incomprehensible may still exert its will over humanity, just as climate change will surely progress despite our inability to fully conceptualize it.
Conclusion
The concept of the sublime in many iterations, from the Burkean and Kantian sublime to the modern Anthropocene sublime, can be identified within VanderMeer’s Annihilation and can be said to be a metaphor for climate change within the Anthropocene. However, each theorist interacts with the concept of the sublime in a different manner, and one reading one novel contained within the ever-increasing genre of Anthropocene fiction cannot be sufficient in definitively identifying a form of the genre. It can reasonably be said that the sublime is a helpful concept in navigating the scale and incomprehensibility of climate change, but the lack of an agreed upon definition of the sublime in the context of the Anthropocene makes it difficult to unequivocally assert its importance across the genre. What one theorist such as Hitt may consider the sublime, another such as Chua may disagree with, and what one researcher may identify as the sublime, others may identify as the uncanny or the abcanny.
Despite these difficulties, the examination of the relation between the sublime and the incomprehensible scale of climate change in the Anthropocene produces compelling evidence that the sublime remains relevant to contemporary literature and should not be relegated to purely aesthetic analyses of Romantic literature. There is undoubtedly a sublime to be found within the Anthropocene, but whether it is a new sublime or some amalgamation of each of its previous iterations is a topic for further investigation.
It would likely be both interesting and useful to the topic of Anthropocene fiction to compare Trexler’s theories with the theories of the weird genre, and to do a comparative reading of several novels that seem to fall within both genres to further solidify the
qualifications of a novel of Anthropocene fiction as well as to identify potential forms that may crossover from the weird into the Anthropocene, such as monsters.
Regardless of the individual interest in Annihilation as a novel or weirdness as a genre, such an evaluation of the role of the sublime in the novel is valuable in offering not
only deeper insight and investigation in Anthropocene fiction as a genre, but also the issue of climate change beyond literature, pervasive throughout the Anthropocene epoch. The
techniques employed within Anthropocene fiction, such as the sublime within Annihilation, can provide insight into how humanity is facing the uncertain future of the environment and what they can expect in their interactions with the planet, as they continue to impact the earth and the earth, in return, impacts humanity. The issues of incomprehensibility, scale, and agency discussed by Trexler and other literary theorists are not bound exclusively to literature, nor can the reader extricate themselves from the sublimity of climate change represented through the Crawler in Annihilation quite as simply as one might hope. It is very likely that humanity is facing a sublime future in the coming years of the Anthropocene, and Anthropocene fiction and research such as this could be precisely what is needed to ensure society is not facing the impossibly vast climate change with useless instruments, broken methodology, and selfish motivations. Instead, Anthropocene fiction could provide humanity with new questions, and help them know what questions to ask in the face of climate change.
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