Dr. Melinda Backer
Melinda Backer delves into the dark wildernesses of Jeff Vandermeer’s The Southern Reach trilogy and the Smoky Mountains, a national park near her home in Tennessee. One is real, one is imagined but, in both cases, visitors are enticed—and sometimes forever changed by—the fear and wonder of these elusive Gothic environments.
“What is. . . terroir, then?”
“A wine term… It means the specific characteristics of a place—the geography, geology, and climate that, in concert with the vine’s own genetic propensities, can create a startling, deep, original vintage” (Vandermeer, 2014: p. 131).
Jeff Vandermeer’s (2014) Southern Reach trilogy is an ecohorror series focused on a stretch of bordered land called Area X. The humans in this series attempt to identify the characteristics of this region by thinking about what it produces, the terroir of the land. One character, Whitby, believes that if he can understand the characteristics of Area X, then he can understand why it replicates humanity and mutates the natural world. Area X mutates human life the same way it mutates other lifeforms, without consideration of agency and seemingly without any agenda that isn’t already understood to be part of nature. The government agency that studies Area X (rife with parallels to postmodern themes of paranoia and control) explores the wilderness and attempts to both map and understand how nature works in this landscape. In the second book of this trilogy, Authority, one of the characters, aptly called Control, discovers, ‘that placing trust in a word like border had been a mistake. A slow unraveling of terms unrecognized until too late’ (Vandermeer, 2014: p. 297). The border around this region is so porous that the humans who explore it and who attempt to control it never fully understand what they are doing or what Area X is. What is initially understood to be a pristine wilderness that aggressively protects its borders against the pollution of mankind becomes something alien that must be understood not just because of its unknown intentions, but because it transforms those who come into contact with it.
Near Knoxville, Tennessee, just forty minutes outside of the popular tourist city Pigeon Forge, beautiful trails run through and around the Smoky Mountains. These mountain trails are known as destinations themselves, offering nature lovers and hikers alike a way to explore the beauty and wildness of nature along carefully maintained trails that are treated regularly to prevent poison ivy from growing too close and sometimes paved to allow inclusive access to the majesty of nature. Perhaps the wilderness of the Smoky Mountains isn’t as horrifying because little of it is unknown or unknowable. If a hiker wanted to, they could investigate the fauna and flora that decorates the trails. These plants are often identified on a placard. There are even tour guides that offer their expertise to navigate the more challenging trails. However, the feeling that people get from coming into close contact with nature isn’t predicated on how untouched it is by human hands. All encounters contain the potential for transformative experience, but when people open themselves to experience nature beyond the (Kantian) aesthetic, the possibilities for growth and change increase.
What is it about the idea of “wilderness” that people find so compelling? Several ecocritics have engaged with this question, including Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, Amitav Ghosh, Timothy Morton, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Stacy Alaimo, Mel Chen, Rob Nixon, and Anna Tsing. Each of these authors has a different understanding of what wilderness is and how humans relate to or exist within it. The one commonality they all share is their agreement that in literary depictions of the natural world, “wilderness” is often used as a placeholder for the unknown, the unfamiliar, the weird, or the holy—in essence, a geographic space where human knowledge might not be enough to navigate. In the Southern Reach Trilogy, the human characters have different motivations for their actions, but are all driven in part by curiosity to discover and explore the unknown.
Coined by Timothy Morton (2013), the term “hyper object” refers a concept that cannot be fully grasped by individual humans but that influences our daily lives; examples include global warming, black holes, and, as David Tompkins (2014) suggests, Area X. Tompkins makes this claim to explain the ‘weirdness’ of Vandermeer’s trilogy. These objects invoke a Lovecraftian affect of awe. I use “affect” here deliberately; fear and wonder—that is to say, awe—is experienced even outside of the boundaries of Area X and occupies the humans that have interacted with it or around it. It endures, it spreads, and it becomes much more than the terroir of the region Area X occupies. The same can be said of any spaces that have that feeling of wilderness. When we go to national parks, we want to experience the beauty of nature, to come face-to-face with the unknown or unknowable. It is easier to describe the unknown as awe-inspiring rather than admit to the inability to fully understand something; if it is given a name, a motivation, and a description it can be contained, quantified, and placed on a placard. But it is in the unknown that we experience the affect of a given region; in Area X, it is a sense of dread or terror. In the Smoky Mountains, even in its most foggy and unknown state, I would say the affect is consistently awe.
Walking along the path to Laurel Falls, one of the most accessible trailheads along the Smokies, one is immediately surrounded by the scents and sounds of a mountain habitat. In the summer, the air is heavy and humid, mosquitoes and bees seem to move slower, and the trail is often packed with people making the hike to the falls. When they arrive, children and adults alike take off their shoes to splash in the water, take pictures in front of the falls, and redress looking happy and renewed. Last time I went, I was with my pregnant sister-in-law and her husband. They were excited to spend some time in Tennessee and were especially excited to spend some time in nature. Our hike up to the falls was motivated by a desire to show off the nature my husband and I had access to. Even though it was raining during their visit, we all paused at the base of the falls to take pictures, splash in the water, and listen to the world around us. The rain meant that there was hardly anyone else on the trail. It was just us, carefully approaching slippery rocks and navigating our way to the falls and back.
What makes the wilderness so compelling? It isn’t, I’d argue, an idea of pristine wilderness, but instead a feeling of awe, the unsettling and pleasant sensation that is sought and often found through exploration. The Smoky Mountains are well-mapped and well-known, yet they are still part of the wilderness that Vandermeer evokes in his novels. As he explores the town beside the Southern Reach, Control says, “This is what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. (Vandermeer, 2014: p. 74). The Smoky Mountains rely on the idea of the border between nature and civilization to offer tourists that sense of awe alongside the assurance that they can walk out of the wilderness and back to their hotel. However, what Vandermeer’s novels demonstrate time and again is that those borders are porous when they exist at all.
Bibliography
Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Tompkins, D. (2014) Weird Ecology: On the Southern Reach Trilogy. Available from: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/weird-ecology-southern-reach-trilogy [Accessed 21/03/2020].
Vandermeer, J. (2014) Authority. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.