The Southern Reach trilogy as Hegelian fiction
This is so stupid
Warning: significant spoilers for Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance
In Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss describes the disillusionment that caused him to abandon his studies in philosophy and pursue anthropology. Under the tutelage of an “arid and dogmatic” professor who was “a sad disappointment,” philosophizing became nothing more than a language game:
It was then that I began to learn how any problem, whether grave or trivial, can be resolved. The method never varies. First you establish the traditional two views of the question. You then put forward a commonsense justification of the one, only to refute it by the other. Finally you send them both packing by the use of a third interpretation, in which both the others are shown to be equally unsatisfactory. Certain verbal manoeuvres enable you, that is, to line up the traditional antitheses as complementary aspects of a single reality: form and substance, content and container, appearance and reality, essence and existence, continuity and discontinuity, and so on. Before long the exercise becomes the merest verbalizing, reflection gives place to a kind of superior punning, and the accomplished philosopher may be recognized by the ingenuity with which he makes ever-bolder play with assonance, ambiguity, and the use of those words which sound alike and yet bear quite different meanings.
In other words, Levi-Strauss is describing the dialectic mode of argument, otherwise referred to as the triadic form or most commonly by its three parts: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. To gloss it again, thesis-antithesis-synthesis is a form of arguing or philosophizing in which a first position is put forth, then a second opposing position negates it, leading to a quandary without a way forward; from this dilemma emerges a third position which brings together and transcends the first two answers. Dialectical thought has deep roots in the history of philosophy—we see it clearly in both the Platonic dialogues and in the rigorous article-objection-reply format of Aquinas’ Summa, for instance—but it took on new, formalized prominence in the 18th and 19th centuries as a component of German Idealism.
I tend to think of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis form as an invention of Hegel’s. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel articulates his vision of the historical dialectic, as each age of human history gives way to the next following the dictate of Spirit (or something. It’s been a long time and Hegel is famously not very clear and my willingness to reread for these articles has its limits). This idea is refuted at length by Tolstoy’s position in War and Peace of “nah man, history is just random stuff happening.” It was also taken up by Marx and modified into dialectical materialism, which ditches Spirit in favor of the conditions under which people lived.
Anyway, as I was considering whether to write this article, I posted on Notes hoping someone could help me find a succinct passage to quote where Hegel explains thesis-antithesis-synthesis. I was immediately, mercilessly owned:
But I also received a couple constructive responses suggesting I might have better luck searching Fichte or Schelling (haven’t read, didn’t do, sorry) and informing me that the triadic form is not much credited by modern Hegelians as a good model of his project (is this true?
sound off in the comments). Whatever. To me it’s the Hegelian dialectic. Why must a newsletter be “correct?” Is it not enough for it to sit in your inbox, unread? In any case it’s an idea that’s out there. Could you use it to structure a story?Thesis
In Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, four women identified only by roles—biologist, surveyor, anthropologist, and psychologist—enter Area X, a pristine patch of wilderness on an abandoned stretch of southern coast. Decades earlier something happened. The cause is mysterious but Area X was cut off from the outside world by an invisible border. Anything that makes contact with it disappears without a trace. There is one known doorway into Area X, a glowing tunnel of light. Crossing is a harrowing, hours-long ordeal that requires expedition members to be placed under hypnosis. Inside, Area X has returned to a purely natural state—there are no toxins in the soil and the few buildings that once stood there have caved in under an extra-advanced state of decay.
Our four expedition members constitute the Twelfth Expedition. The first expedition, we’re told, found only untouched wilderness, nothing weird. The second and third expeditions killed each other and themselves. Our narrator, the biologist, is the widow of a member of the Eleventh Expedition. He, and all his fellow members, never returned from Area X, until suddenly they did, appearing at home with no knowledge of how they got there. But they were different, a shell of unshakeable blankness and vagueness no matter the situation. They all died of cancer a few months later.
Besides base camp, the main landmark on the map of Area X is the lighthouse. No one quite knows what they’re looking for in Area X or what they might hope to learn, but fascination focuses on the lighthouse. Before they can make their way there, however, they find something else: a great stone platform 60 feet across with stairs leading down into the ground. The biologist and the surveyor descend. Along the wall of the stairway glow words of a dark and vengeful sermon, written in some sort of organic film. The biologist leans close to examine the words and the strange barnacle creatures surrounding them and breathes in spores.
A change is occurring. The spores are doing something to the biologist. She feels a “brightness” inside. Her senses are heightened. She feels she’s coming to understand Area X.
The next day the anthropologist is gone. The psychologist’s explanation is unsatisfactory. She clearly knows more than the others and is manipulating them with hypnotic suggestion. Soon the psychologist is MIA as well.
The biologist explores the lighthouse. She finds a photograph of the lighthouse keeper in front of the lighthouse, a little girl playing on the rocks in the background. At the top she finds a hidden storage pit filled with journals from expedition members—far, far more than could be accounted for by twelve expeditions, and how have they all ended up here?The psychologist is on the beach below. She panicked when she saw the biologist approaching, perceiving her as a flame, and jumped from the top of the lighthouse. Her body is broken, and she has a strange wound on her shoulder; she and the anthropologist went back into the underground passage and encountered the creature writing the words on the wall. The anthropologist was killed. Before she dies she tells the biologist that Area X is expanding a little each year.
The biologist returns to “The Tower,” as she calls the underground structure. She sees copies of all the expedition members, including herself, descending. Now, with her brightness intensifying, she can see that what she previously took to be stone is actually flesh, rising and falling with steady inhalations and exhalations. She descends. She meets the creature. It is beyond the limits of human perception—flashing in and out of existence, filling her entire vision, swirling orbs. The creature probes her telepathically and lets her go. As she climbs back up, she looks back and sees within the creature the tortured face of the lighthouse keeper. She writes her account1 and leaves it with the other journals, resolving not to escape Area X but to follow her husband’s track along the coast toward an island, hoping to find him.
Annihilation is about as gripping as they come. I started it one evening and had finished it by the end of the workday the next day. It is a story centered on the mystery of Area X and a set of core questions the reader is desperate for answers to—what is the Tower, what is its relationship with the lighthouse, etc—but it operates in a manner I can only describe as the power of pure assertion. Even as he holds back any ultimate explanations, VanderMeer does not appear to be playing coy. The book is a relentless accumulation of new information. This inexplicable phenomenon, and this monstrosity, and this evidence the expedition was seriously misled by their bosses—VanderMeer gives you more and more, challenging readers to integrate assertion after assertion into their theory of Area X. It is thesis as storytelling mode.
Antithesis
Authority takes us outside Area X. Our new perspective character is Control—real name John Rodriguez—who is beginning his tenure as the new acting director of the Southern Reach, the organization responsible for studying Area X. In reality he’s something of an undercover agent sent by “Central,” the forbidding entity that oversees the Southern Reach. He comes from a family of spies—both his grandfather and his mother, Jackie Severance—Pynchon-name alert!—were also agents.
As Control is brought up to speed, we learn that basically everything the biologist was told and therefore what we were told in the previous book was a lie. The psychologist from the Twelfth Expedition was actually the director of the Southern Reach. There have been far more than twelve expeditions. The First Expedition, rather than an uneventful nature walk, encountered horrors beyond imagination; only one member made it back alive.
Control visits the border with squirrely science guy Whitby. He thinks a lot about his mommy issues. He sorts through the disorganized office of the previous director. He goes for jogs. In between a few new revelations for readers, Control spends a lot of time learning things we already know from the first book and asking questions we know the answers to. It is very boring.
The biologist reappears, as do the surveyor and the anthropologist. We know Area X can produce copies of people, which the other two must be because they died and because these versions are blank shells like the returned Eleventh members. But the biologist is different; she’s hostile and resists Control’s attempts to interrogate her. She tells him he can’t understand, she’s not the biologist. Call her Ghost Bird instead. She is a copy, but a copy that is a fully realized and distinct individual, albeit with the biologist’s memories.
Eventually two things happen: Control realizes the previous director was the little girl in the picture with the lighthouse keeper—she grew up on the abandoned coast before it was Area X. Secondly, he encounters a wall in the Southern Reach building where one shouldn’t be. A wall made of flesh. The border is moving, Area X is overtaking the Southern Reach. No one else cares. Control flees. He heads north, where he thinks Ghost Bird will go. He finds her at some tidepools where the biologist once did fieldwork. She releases the light inside her, creating a new entrance to Area X. They dive in.
Authority is a self-conscious opposite of Annihilation. VanderMeer himself described it in these terms, “If Annihilation is an expedition into Area X, then Authority is an expedition into the Southern Reach.” Where Annihilation is taut, Authority is slack. Where Annihilation’s characters are decisive, Authority’s are tormented by indecision. Above all, where Annihilation asserts, Authority implies. I struggled with this book because it plays coy with everything. It works by endless suggestion and insinuation. As Control digs into the files and investigates the late director’s house, he finds scrap after scrap of evidence all suggesting… something. Eventually the border moves and obviates his work. I still don’t feel like I have a sense of what the upshot of all that implication was.
I understand what VanderMeer is going for in this novel. Our frustration is Control’s frustration. This would be the experience of an interloper suddenly installed as the head of a dysfunctional organization that has known nothing but failure and death for its entire existence. There’s too much history behind everything said. There are secrets in every closet. It’s not even that the other people at the Southern Reach are holding out on him (although Grace, the assistant director, absolutely is), it’s that they’ve lived in the shadow of Area X for so long they can’t see what they take for granted anymore, even the stuff that’s cosmic and chilling.
Authority meanders. Instead of Annihilation’s deluge of information, it emphasizes everything that’s not known about Area X, and how hard it would be to fill in those gaps. Where the biologist operated with singular purpose motivated by professional curiosity, Authority emphasizes that most people’s motivations will be contradictory and personal.
Synthesis
Acceptance fractures the timeline. In the present, Control and Ghost Bird are back in Area X. Their plan is to go to the island and find the biologist. There they find Grace, who was trapped in Area X when the border moved. It’s been three years for her. Finally confirmation of something that’s been teased since the first book: time moves differently in Area X.
Thirty years in the past, the lighthouse keeper, Saul Evans, is being tormented by kooks from the Seance and Science Brigade. They’ve been studying the abandoned coast for years but now have become fixated on the ornate lamp atop the lighthouse, its long history suggestive of greater mysteries. A little girl named Gloria often comes around to talk to him. Outside doing chores while the S&SB tamper with the lamp, Saul sees something on the ground. A flower? A light? He touches it. Soon he is hallucinating, changing. Gloria leaves the coast to stay with her dad before Saul’s change is complete and the border comes down.
Gloria grows up and becomes director of the Southern Reach. She never confesses her connection to Area X. Gloria takes Whitby into Area X for weeks. This breaks him, makes him the strange, haunted man Control encountered. Gloria knows that the creature writing the words in the Tower is Saul Evans, her old friend. When she returned to Area X with the Twelfth Expedition, she brought a letter for him.
For this third installment, VanderMeer combines his previous two approaches. We have characters moving with purpose toward their hoped-for answers while we also delve into the past to better understand the people most affected by Area X. The result is remarkably effective. As we watch Saul succumb to his change we watch a full person be annihilated by forces beyond our imagination. Saul’s experience is as close as we can get to understanding.
So here then is the synthesis. Annihilation made us want more than anything to understand Area X. Authority immersed us in the frustration of our inability to do so. Acceptance reasserts the primacy of the human experience; that is something we can comprehend and it can give us some tiny insight into what happened on the abandoned coast all those decades before. It’s something. We can accept that.
One bad habit I’m always on guard against in my writing are premises that boil down to “x=y,” that is, ideas along the line of “this pop culture thing is actually this philosophy thing.” When I came up with the idea for this piece, I worried it hewed a little close to that formula. But, I reassured myself, I was going to turn Hegel’s system on its head. Hegel’s historical dialectic advances toward knowing more and more—the last section of the Phenomenology is titled “Absolute Knowing.” But the Southern Reach trilogy ends with not-knowing. What a twist, I would write, that thesis-antithesis-synthesis could produce not a new way of knowing but its opposite.
Well then I finally went digging for Hegel’s remarks and found in the Preface this withering assessment:
Of course, the triadic form must not be regarded as scientific when it is reduced to a lifeless schema, a mere shadow, and when scientific organization is degraded into a table of terms… This formalism, of which we have already spoken generally and whose style we wish here to describe in more detail, imagines that it has comprehended and expressed the nature and life of a form when it has endowed it with some determination of the schema as a predicate. The predicate may be subjectivity or objectivity, or, say, magnetism, electricity, etc., contraction or expansion, east or west, and the like. Such predicates can be multiplied to infinity, since in this way each determination or form can again be used as a form or moment in the case of an other, and each can gratefully perform the same service for an other. In this sort of circle of reciprocity one never learns what the thing itself is, nor what the one or the other is.
There you have it, from Hegel himself: the Southern Reach trilogy is Hegelian fiction. We could expand our set of terms indefinitely, you might say we could send an endless succession of expeditions into Area X, but this will only yield more confusion. The only end to the dialectic is silence.
It’s always funny when a really well-written book is presented as the writing of one of the characters. Like damn girl, you wasted your time as a biologist! Should of been a writer!
But, Danny,
This pop culture thing IS actually this philosophy thing.
Always.