annihilation

In Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), a unique relationship is established between a fecund and futuristic environment called Area X and a group of scientists commissioned to probe this area. While the scientists’ initial response toward this area is human-centered and Anthropocenic, the conventional expectations of this initial response are severely shattered later in the novel. The present study believes that the various aspects of this shattering gives us a glimpse of the kind of relationship we could have with the environment in the Anthropocene, the human epoch. By utilizing the theoretical concepts in key secondary sources – such as Pieter Vermeulen’s Literature and the Anthropocene (2020) and Benjamin Robertson’s None of This Is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer (2018) – the study identifies that various demarcational means fail to fulfill their binary making function due to the vastness and unmappable nature of environments such as Area X. Accordingly, this failure constitutes the study’s purpose in that it shows conventional paradigms of mankind’s knowledge bodies could not delve into the cognizance and intentions of an amoral and un-registrable environment. This failure also shows recalcitrant areas such as Area X are already present and all encompassing around us.

In Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, the way the Anthropocenic set of circumstances is narrated could not be easily explained away through giving precedence to either materialist or structuralist narratologists. In this sense, neither the materiality of the environment nor the arbitrary categories and models of structuralists such as Greimas could determine the ultimate narratological scheme with which one could make sense out of such set of circumstances. Only through modifying the extant narratological categories and models and exposing their arbitrariness via indicating their incapability to contain the formidable materiality of the environment, one could reach a workable semiotic framework for devising a narrative out of the anthropocenic set of circumstances. Reaching this framework would be the present study’s research objective. As its findings, the study recognizes that such a framework would not give the agency of devising narration to either non-human/environmental or human entities in the anthropocene, and at the same time will be the result of the uneasy, yet workable, coupling of these entities. This framework would also acknowledge the uncontainable nature of the environment in the anthropocene, and turn both human and non-human entities into mere actants that have no particular motivation. The study uses the modified narratological models of Algirdas Greimas and Amitav Gosh proposed by critics like Hanes Bergthaller, Marco Caracciolo and Jean Paul Petitimbert to reach this semiotic framework.