“My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease.” (Annihilation, p110)
In my Goodreads review of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, I described the book as “beautifully architectural”. I’m often asked to elaborate on this idea whenever I talk to people about it, which is understandable—I’m coming down from a five-year architecture degree as we speak and have spent those five years steeped in increasingly potent romantic notions of embodied space. It’s a hard sentiment to pin down in a few sentences, though, especially on the fly. The best way I can think to sum it up is to say that Annihilation is, at its core, a story about the relationship between body and place. Every ounce of tension in the book comes from the subversion of our expectations of the tangible world. That is to say that in order to work, it relies on both its characters’ and its readers’ innate understanding of both the natural and built environments—what is physically, spatially, and physiologically plausible, let alone possible—and drapes Area X over the framework of this collective understanding.
Before we go any further, you should know that while there is a movie adaptation of Annihilation, this essay specifically uses the book as its source material. The 2018 film, written and directed by Alex Garland, is great, but notably loose. Many of the things I loved so much in the book went untouched in the adaptation, presumably because other elements of the story are far easier to translate into a visual medium. Personally, I don’t consider this a loss; it’s worth mentioning, though, just in case you’re going into this having only seen the movie. I’m going to dig into some of the more phenomenological aspects of Area X that are really fleshed out in the book, and if you find them interesting, I encourage you to read it! It’s under 200 pages in length and the pacing is excellent.
Annihilation is a research log written by a biologist who has been sent into Area X, a section of the southern American coast that has been cut off from the rest of the world behind some kind of “border” for decades. Apart from the expedition members sent into the area by the government agency The Southern Reach, no human life remains there, and Area X has been totally reclaimed by nature. After months of training, our biologist is sent into the area with three other women (an anthropologist, a surveyor, and a psychologist), with instructions to map the terrain and record all observations of their surroundings and of one another. These four women make up the twelfth expedition crew sent into the area. Former expeditions ended in things like mass suicides or shootouts among the expedition crew—the members of the eleventh expedition all died of cancer within weeks of their return. The idea, of course, is to glean some understanding of Area X; no one knows how or why it exists, or whether or not it poses a threat to the world outside its border.
Shortly after they pass through the gateway into Area X, the crew comes upon “a circular block of some grayish stone seeming to mix cement and ground-up seashells. It measured roughly sixty feet in diameter, this circular block, and was raised from ground level by about eight inches… Starting at due north, a rectangular opening set into the surface of the block revealed stairs spiraling down into darkness. The entrance was obscured by the webs of banana spiders and debris from storms, but a cool draft came from below.” (Annihilation, p6). Embedded in the forest underbrush, this staircase is not indicated on any map brought back by previous expeditions. The crew can’t contact their superiors outside Area X’s border to report the finding; they must observe and document it anew. The story comes back to this place again and again. It begs to be understood.
And so we begin with two concrete instances of architecture: this staircase spiraling into the ground and its counterpart, a lighthouse on the coast, with a staircase spiraling upwards. The latter is archetypal while the former is indistinct, ambiguous; each informs our conception of the other, but still the brain must stretch to hold the two simultaneously. By using architecture as a jumping-off point, VanderMeer primes us for spatialized thinking, and as the story unfolds it becomes clear that spatial perception is woven into its entire telling. We’re utterly immersed in Area X from the first few pages; the way light enters the place, the temperature of it. This immersion allows for the establishment of Annihilation’s major literary themes and motifs, many of which are explored via architectural imagery/phenomena. For example, inquiries into the nature of duality (perhaps duplicity?) and inversion are central to not only Annihilation but the entire Southern Reach trilogy. It creeps in as nothing more than a bad feeling—sharp but ultimately shapeless—and grows larger, and easier to describe, as Area X is rendered more and more clearly. Armed with hindsight, however, we can go back and locate the alarm bells from the very beginning. Take for example this account of the first descent into the stairwell (hereby called “the tower”, as it’s referred to by the narrator):
“The surveyor descended until we could only see her face framed in the gloom below, and then not even that. She left an empty space that was shocking to me, as if the reverse had actually happened: as if a face had suddenly floated into view out of the darkness.” (Annihilation, p19)
It’s a brilliant description because it plays on what we subconsciously know about the way our eyes perceive light and shadow, the way little circles of light will dance behind the eyelids after, say, a camera flash. The suggestion of a face floating into view is unsettling by itself, but accompanied by the sudden absence of the surveyor’s face, the eerie image is linked to a phenomenon so ubiquitously real that it hardly registers: the staircase is so suddenly and utterly dark that, by comparison, the surveyor’s face meets the eyes as an isolated spot of brightness, suddenly swallowed.
(Tadao Ando’s Vitra Conference Pavilion, from ArchDaily)
Light and shadow have been intrinsic to the built environment since the advent of, well, buildings—the way that contrasting light defines boundaries is what gives us reliable depth perception. It was the modernist school of architectural thought that capitalized on this, though, and popularized light and shadow as distinct architectural elements. I usually hate to quote Le Corbusier, but in service of a modernist philosophy primer he actually articulates it quite concisely: “Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.” The minimalistic ethos of modernism recognized shadow as a visual form to be played with, and the shaping of light in a work of architecture remains essential to architectural analysis. In his 1933 essay, aptly titled In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki puts it a different way: “Find beauty not only in the thing itself but in the pattern of the shadows, the light and dark which that thing provides.”
All of this is to say that levels of light and darkness are among the first things we register about a space when we enter it. Describing the nature of the light in a place is an excellent way to faithfully convey how a space feels, as well as looks—imagine a stairwell bathed in rectangles of afternoon sunlight, for example. Now imagine that same stairwell dissipating into darkness. This is fertile ground in the telling of Annihilation, a story in love with the tension between its opposing conditions.
“The surveyor and anthropologist had both expressed a kind of relief when they had seen the lighthouse. Its appearance on both the map and in reality reassured them, anchored them. Being familiar with its function further reassured them.
With the tower, we knew none of these things. We could not intuit its full outline. We had no sense of its purpose. And now that we had begun to descend into it, the tower still failed to reveal any hint of these things.” (Annihilation, p21-22)
These few sentences alone hit the nail right on the head when it comes to much of what makes the tower so unsettling. The sole purpose of a lighthouse is to provide unobstructed light, requiring that they be built on high ground where land meets water, with as few structures surrounding them as possible. This is what makes their strong silhouettes so iconic, and so easily recognizable. The nature of their function requires that they must be. One may not know exactly what’s going on behind the walls of a lighthouse, but assuming that all laws of physics and construction are obeyed, it’s at least possible to tell where it begins and ends—what is and is not a part of it, and how long it could be reasonably expected to take to get from the bottom to the top. More broadly, it’s possible to confirm the existence of a bottom and a top to begin with. The ability to “intuit the full outline” of a thing implies that it is contained.
The cult classic House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski takes a different spatialized approach to this unknowing; in it, a family moves into a house with a hallway at its center that continually unfolds, expands, and branches off into other hallways, seemingly to no end, yet is not at all visible from the outside of the house. Explorers of the hallway travel for miles through it, and still they find next to nothing besides walls, floors, doorways and stairways. There is no other side—they are effectively drawn into a labyrinth. The house at the center of the story is ultimately unknowable because “no one ever sees that labyrinth in its entirety. Therefore comprehension of its intricacies must always be derived from within.” (House of Leaves, p114). There is only so much one can discern from the interior. The instinct, when tangled in a puzzle, is to get outside of it, to see it entire.
“Holloway just scowls and keeps pushing forward, in what appears to be a determined effort to find something, something different, something defining, or at least some kind of indication of an outsideness to that place. At one point Holloway even succeeds in scratching, stabbing, and ultimately kicking a hole in a wall, only to discover another windowless room with doorway leading to another hallway spawning yet another endless series of empty rooms and passageways, all with walls potentially hiding and thus hinting at a possible exterior, though invariably winding up as just another border to another interior.” (House of Leaves, p119)
If total understanding of a thing comes about when one is able to see it from all sides, then the tower is nearly incomprehensible. Where Danielewski’s house is labyrinthine, the tower is buried. Over and over, the house subverts the expectation of an exterior, instead revealing impossible amounts of interior with no hope of discerning its layout. The fact that the tower is embedded in the ground removes any hope of untangling it from the outside. One might walk the perimeter of the house, if they could only reach it, but what lies on the other side of the tower’s walls is not air but dirt. It would require an archaeological dig to get a truly conclusive idea of its size and shape.
Why is this so disquieting? In a way, it suggests that the architecture in question knows something we don’t. The unconscious expectation of humanity is that the built environment is our domain. We know how to open and shut doors, to turn locks. We expect that the floors will not cave and that the walls will stay upright and rooted in place, and if they don’t, it means that something has gone very wrong. But the tangible and spatial elements that make up Area X are described as possessing some sort of aliveness. The setting is something that surrounds, with intent, as an actor, rather than circumstantially, as a stage set.
“The dull emergency lights glowed from the edges of the camp, making the tents into triangles of shadow. Even the darkness seemed more alive to me, surrounding me like something physical.” (Annihilation, p75)
The overarching idea is of one’s environment as a counteractive force—that a work of architecture can coerce its user into a certain, prescribed use. “Antagonistic” architecture, in which the hostility manifests as the repeated suggestion of a use, function or application. Like most uncomfortable notions, the fear is borne of a perceived lack of control. However, I would argue that this tension between body and structure is central to how we engage with the built environment. Without the assistance of technology, doors don’t open for us willingly; we must push or pull them. We must go around columns or walls in our path rather than walking right through them. Dark hallways tend to give us feelings of dread. We negotiate with our architecture every day. The fear is that it might have the upper hand.
“The tower steps kept revealing themselves, those whitish steps like the spiraling teeth of some unfathomable beast, and we kept descending because there seemed to be no choice.” (Annihilation, p47)
The presumptions we make about space, as well as the tension between our expectations of it and the reality, are the cornerstones of what makes Annihilation feel so innately architectural to me. The tower is so unsettling because it plays with our learned understanding of physics and spatial definition. Without this understanding, the threat of it is entirely nullified. As the story unfolds, VanderMeer trains us to question everything: rather than ask why this specific instance of architecture “misbehaves” in such a way, we must reassess how to classify the architecture. In other words, it’s a question of language.
“At first, I only saw it as a tower. I don’t know why the word tower came to me, given that it tunneled into the ground. I could as easily have considered it a bunker or a submerged building. Yet as soon as I saw the staircase, I remembered the lighthouse on the coast and had a sudden vision of the last expedition drifting off, one by one, and sometime thereafter the ground shifting in a uniform and preplanned way to leave the lighthouse standing where it had always been but depositing this underground part of it inland.” (Annihilation, p6)
From the moment the crew first discovers the staircase in the forest, they can’t seem to agree on how to refer to it. The psychologist, anthropologist and surveyor begin by calling it a tunnel, but the biologist can’t make herself see anything but a tower, herself standing at its base. To say that something is a tower implies an apex. A staircase continuing indefinitely upward might be a pillar, but only when we see the top can we call it a tower. The word tunnel most often implies an entry and exit point—a tunnel with an end might more appropriately be called a burrow, or a bunker, in the proper context. The biologist’s discomfort with the word reflects a subconscious understanding that the structure before them must end somewhere, does not just continue infinitely through to the other side of the earth.
What does it mean to be a tower? A tunnel? If something looks like a tunnel and acts like a tunnel, is it safe to engage with it as one would a tunnel? Questions like these become more and more central to the investigation of Area X the more we learn about it. Another example of this takes place at a Southern Reach status meeting in the third book of the series, Acceptance, which dives into the events leading up to the twelfth expedition. Prior to this meeting, explorers bring back a potted plant from Area X that, upon investigation, refuses to die. Scientists at the agency perform increasingly destructive operations on the plant, and without fail, it continues to sprout anew.
“’I don’t think we’re looking at a plant,’ Whitby says, tentative, at one status meeting, risking his new relationship with the science division, which he has embraced as a kind of sanctuary.
‘Then why are we seeing a plant, Whitby?’ Cheney, managing to convey an all-consuming exasperation. ‘Why are we seeing a plant that looks like a plant being a plant. Doing plant things, like photosynthesis and drawing water up through its roots. Why? That’s not a tough question, is it, really? Or is it? Maybe it is a tough question, I don’t know, for reasons beyond me. But that’s going to be a problem, don’t you think? Having to reassert that things we think are the things they are actually are in fact the things they are and not some other thing entirely. Just think of all the fucking things we will have to reevaluate if you’re right, Whitby.’” (Acceptance, p218)
If it looks like a plant and acts like a plant, but isn’t a plant, then what is it? Once again, the story leaves us no choice but to question everything. Ultimately, this is Annihilation’s frightening core, and it manifests most often in the tangible and spatial elements that comprise Area X, making the central problem of Annihilation a problem of place. If we can’t trust our understanding of the way our bodies relate to the space around it, then how are we expected to engage with space at all?
"Holloway just scowls and keeps pushing forward, in what appears to be a determined effort to find something, something different, something defining." - Annihilation
"Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see." - Moby-Dick