Jeff VanderMeer鈥檚 Annihilation (Part III)

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href="/magazine/interviews-and-profiles">Interviews & Profiles</a> </div> <div class="new-article-heading-title"> Jeff VanderMeer鈥檚 Annihilation (Part III) </div> </div> </div> <hr class="new-article-heading-hr"> <div class="article-details-heading section container-fluid" id="" > <div class="" id=""> <script> $(document).ready(function () { var articleBody = $('.new-article-page-body-container .new-article-page-body'); var paragraphs = articleBody.find('p'); for (var i = 0; i < paragraphs.length; i++) { var paragraph = $(paragraphs[i]); var hasText = paragraph.contents().filter(function () { return this.nodeType == 3 }).length > 0; if (hasText) { paragraph.addClass('speakable-body'); break; } } }); </script> <div class="new-article"> <div class="new-article-cover-div"> <div class="new-article-cover-content-div"> <div class="new-article-cover-content"> <h1 class="new-article-cover-content-title speakable-title">Jeff VanderMeer鈥檚 Annihilation (Part III): Towers of Babel</h1> <p class="new-article-cover-content-desc speakable-title"> The symbolic connections between Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation and three artists' interpretations of the Tower of Babel, in the final installment of our series about the novel </p> <div class="new-article-cover-content-source"> <p>Michael Pearce / MutualArt</p> <p>Oct 18, 2024</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="new-article-cover-img-div"> <img src="https://media.mutualart.com/Images/2024_10/16/14/145240241/f17c5e10-22c7-4c2e-980f-fe5484ca46bf_570.Jpeg" alt="Jeff VanderMeer鈥檚 Annihilation (Part III): Towers of Babel" class="img-responsive" /> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-md-10 col-sm-8"> <div class="new-article-page-body-container container-fluid"> <div class="new-article-page-body"> <p>Jeff VanderMeer’s wonderfully strange and obsessive novel of dark discovery <em>Annihilation</em> is an important piece of inspiring contemporary symbolic literature. It begins with a hypnotized research team of women exploring the strange “Area X” in the Forgotten Coast of Florida’s panhandle, who come upon the gloomy well of a vertical shaft dug into a landscape of mystery and threat, an un-tower set at the edge of a landscape of swamp reeds and storm blown trees bent and beaten by salted coast winds. This strange tower, the first of two, is an undocumented surprise, an unexpected and upside-down barbican excavated from the eerie land and plunging deep into the black earth, the occult mirror of the second, a ruinous lighthouse, mapped, and planned, and known, once a high and bright beacon of clarity and a symbol of safety, built tall to guide sailors to sanctuary, now battered and besieged, crudely fortified with glass sherds and barbed wire by long-dead defenders facing a virulent sea. The Biologist on the team has intruded into Area X on the trail of her husband, a member of a previous expedition, who lost himself in the strangeness of the spreading contagion of the becoming world and wandered home to abstraction and a cancered end.</p> <p><img alt="Carrie Anne Baade, Tower of Babel, Oil on linen, 48" x 36", 2018" src="https://media.mutualart.com/Images/Articles/10_2024/16/16b9fde6-9a3b-48a2-8369-52d437d6c3fa-Carrie Anne Baade, Tower of Babel, Oil on linen, 2018.Jpeg" /></p> <p><span style="font-size:10px;">Carrie Anne Baade, <em>Tower of Babel</em>, 2018, Oil on linen, 48" x 36"</span></p> <p>Artist Carrie Anne Baade has known VanderMeer for two decades, her work appearing in his compilations of steampunk and strange fiction before <em>Annihilation</em> flung him into the international spotlight. She says he writes like “…a wall of sound, doing something like Jimi Hendrix with all of it, where it’s all reverb and amplification, and turning things back in on themselves.” Reading <em>Annihilation</em>, Baade perceived a relationship between the lighthouse which is the center of the transformations which have altered the DNA of plants and creatures in Area X, and the inverted tower, which is the entrance to an underworld lair of subconscious mystery and change and home to a monstrous creature the Biologist dubs “the Crawler.” Baade’s hieratic painting, <em>Babel</em>, is in VanderMeer’s collection, and she explained his ownership of the piece, “…he said he was really attached to the tower of Babel, so now I know that was connected to the book, but I didn’t when he acquired the painting. It was one of those things where it almost felt secretive. I never even posted it on my website. It was exhibited in a museum and then acquired by him, and somehow it felt like it was so much his that I don’t own it. It’s never happened before.” She believes that <em>Annihilation</em> was among the reasons VanderMeer acquired <em>Babel</em>. “It is a bit of a clue,” she said, “The painting started off as a penile form, because it was a painting about patriarchy but through Queen Elizabeth, then, in the process of painting it turned into a tower of Babel, and I think that’s pertinent… because the big symbol in the story is the tunnel or the tower, the tunnel or the tower, and that was what happened in this painting, if you think about the female form, and then the tower, and the vaginal, and the phallic.”</p> <p>Two opposing towers, then – one a slime-tracked shaft splitting mother earth as a damp home to primordial horror, the other a dry and dusty erection raising fire into the heavens, filled with a history of human violence – these allegorical opposites must be reconciled to find the perfection of married elements, binding the elements above and below into the material world of sensual experience. But beware – when the bewildered and uninitiated explorers attempted to decipher the mysteries of Area X, they were transformed – and not necessarily improved – by their meeting with the <em>nigredo</em> crawler from the bottom of the world. Only purified material survives the fire of the alembic. Much is destroyed. The glow and light that grows within the Biologist is the bright clarity of <em>albedo</em>.</p> <p><img alt="Scott Eagle, The Power of Babble, 1993, Acrylic and oil on collage mounted to panel, W36" x H48", Private Collection " src="https://media.mutualart.com/Images/Articles/10_2024/16/d0811dee-dabe-4cc9-ad2d-ca594dd3c375-Scott Eagle The Power of Babble Acrylic and oil on collage mounted to panel 1993 Private Collection .Jpeg" /></p> <p><span style="font-size:10px;"><a class="SingleLineItemLink" target="_blank" href="/Artist/Scott-Eagle/1623C27CC90E776B">Scott Eagle</a>, <em>The Power of Babble</em>, 1993, Acrylic and oil on collage mounted to panel, W36" x H48", Private Collection  </span></p> <p>Scott Eagle’s <em>The Power of Babble</em> ties the inverted tower to the tornados which infiltrated his work and dreams for a long period when his nightly journeys into unconsciousness were accompanied by recurrent nightmares of approaching twisters, complete in their destructive power. Searching for meaning, he painted a mountain as the <em>yang</em> of the tornado’s <em>yin</em>; a symbol of pure power in motion beating against a symbol of unmovable stability. Still mourning her husband, the Biologist descends the twisted tower walking widdershins like the winds of hurricanes and tornados to unwind the world that was, to lose and find herself in an alchemy of the self.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-md-10 col-sm-8"> <div class="new-article-page-body-container container-fluid"> <div class="new-article-page-body"> <p>As the investigators in <em>Annihilation</em> descend into the cone of the inverted tower, in darkness and horror they approach the unthinkable and formless crawler that may be the source of their transformations, twisting downward into dread following a fungal trail of unfathomable but poetic language growing on the wall that infects the protagonist Biologist. The rolling language feels scriptural, an apocryphal imagining from the prophets, or a gothic portent quoted from a penny dreadful. <em>Annihilation</em> is a book of genesis. The Biologist reads, "Where lies the straggling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen...” but the unending sentence corkscrews into doom, a palimpsest of words over words scrawled in a stream of meaning and meaninglessness. Of the four explorers only the Biologist, who inhales the golden spores spilled from the subconscious text written on the walls of the shaft by the moaning Crawler creature, endures, but she is a creature of becoming, now, impregnated by shining new life. She is Eve after the apple, an initiate of Eleusis after the mushroom mysteries, awakening to the new knowledge granted by the fungus tree of good and evil. There is heretical reward in the risk.</p> <p><img alt="Graham Toms, Tower of Babel, Acrylic on canvas, 24" X 30", Private Collection" src="https://media.mutualart.com/Images/Articles/10_2024/16/e5fac394-4e22-4279-ba80-3d18c505072d-Graham Toms, Tower of Babel, Acrylic on canvas, Private Collection.Jpeg" /><span style="font-size:10px;">Graham Toms, <em>Tower of Babel</em>, Acrylic on canvas, 24" X 30", Private Collection</span></p> <p>Graham Toms’ <em>Tower of Babel</em> is a reflection of the biblical tone of the tower of <em>Annihilation</em>. His is a futurist metaphor of the tower in the book of <em>Genesis</em>, which evolved and furthered the Sumerian myth <em>Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta</em>, and explained why the disunited world was the way it was. He points to the biblical account, where the tower was a ziggurat, a spectacle of building that projected the power of the Babylonians throughout the world and a gateway to heaven, providing access to extra-terrestrial realms. To Toms, words are information. In utopian dreams of humanity finding universal agreement upon how to live, the multiplicity of languages must be eradicated and replaced with one tongue to unite the disparate peoples of earth. Information must become accessible to all. Nearly half a century ago, as desktop computers began their dominance of our homes and work, ideas of the internet promised a vision of heaven on earth, and a massive and ethereal construction of infrastructure and code reached to the heavens, designed to make all information, all words, available to all mankind, and promising an unprecedented chance for egalitarian knowledge. But not all information was equal, and instead of bringing a new age of wonderful wisdom and global harmony, the web tangled mankind in sectarian conflict, exposing sharp differences and encouraging tribal division.</p> <p>In his <em>The Tower of Babel</em>, Toms imagines a machine world after humanity, when AI’s have achieved a consolidation of authority, and build their world in emulation of their vanished creators, mimicking what was with a highly evolved but pointless technological simulacrum. The luminous script in the inverted tower immediately reminded him of the unreadable message written by the hand of God upon the wall at Belshazzar's feast that could only be understood by righteous Daniel. Toms said, “The writing on the wall was prophetic of impending doom. The writing transcended any era and had the same ambiguity, it was never meant to be understood. There’s a continuing theme of redemption, and sin, and purging.”</p> <p><img alt="Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, Oil on wood panel, 45" 脳 61"" src="https://media.mutualart.com/Images/Articles/10_2024/16/0c1d9ff5-5379-442c-bbd1-f4d133aa2fea-Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, Oil on wood panel.Jpeg" /><span style="font-size:10px;">Pieter Bruegel the Elder, <em>The Tower of Babel</em>, Oil on wood panel, 45" × 61"</span></p> <p>To Toms, Area X was a simulacrum, an uncanny valley spreading throughout panhandle, and destined to gradually invade the world. As people were consumed, they were altered by their contact, but continued to live in the shell of themselves. “It seemed like humanity,” he said, “but we have to be wary of that, because if it’s a biblical context, sin is the origin of man, but it’s gone to nature, and all nature is corrupt. What’s interesting about the mimicry of the entity is that it’s mimicking all creation. In Area X the Biologist felt she was always being watched. The entity is all-knowing – it’s the all-seeing eye of God. God is the word, and the word is God, the source of the origin of life. Bioluminescence.” Let there be light. Toms continued, “The veil is a key word biblically, lifting the veil to see what is true.” Moses wore a veil because his face shone so brightly in witness to the light of Jehovah.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-md-2 col-sm-4"> </div> <div class="col-md-10 col-sm-8"> <div class="new-article-page-body-container container-fluid"> <div class="new-article-page-body"> <p>Alone in the battered lighthouse the Biologist found a huge pile of journals, accounts of hundreds of explorers’ attempts to understand the unknown meaning of the word. Toms said, “The pile of journals was the testimony of every individual who has gone into Area X. They’re not forgotten. …but they were ghosts of themselves.”  The mysteries of the book inspire imagination, integration, and endless misinterpretation.</p> <p>Three artists’ threads of thought to treat the viscid mysteries of VanderMeer’s towers, three paintings of Babel, and three insights into the architecture of <em>Annihilation</em>. The inversion, the transformation of self, and the word.</p> <p><em>Jeff VanderMeer’s new book </em>Absolution<em> will be released October 22, 2024.</em></p> <hr style="box-sizing: content-box; height: 0px; font-family: lato, Moderat, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(19, 23, 33); font-size: 15px;" /> <p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 22px; font-family: lato, Moderat, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(19, 23, 33); font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.5;">For more on auctions, exhibitions, and current trends, visit our <a href="https://www.mutualart.com/Magazine" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; color: rgb(207, 103, 102); text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-family: latobold, sans-serif;" tabindex="0" target="_blank">Magazine Page</a></p> </div> </div> </div> </div> </div>  <div class="" id="" >  <div class="container-fluid new-article-page-related-artists-div homepage-artists"> <div class="new-article-page-more-article-title text-center"> <h3 class="title">Related Artists</h3> </div> <div class="slider-component card-controls card-slider slick-slider-list rel-articles-slider"> <div class="homepage_artists_spaceing text-center col-xs-6 col-sm-4 col-md-3 col-lg-3"> <div class="item-content"> <div class="tac"> <a class="img-block" href="/Artist/Carrie-Ann-Baade/7F6E7FDC64F35632"> <img loading="lazy" src="https://media.mutualart.com/Images/2019_01/04/17/174531589/94c1bf63-6b75-43b6-8bce-dd9cc2ca54af_273.Jpeg" alt="Carrie Ann Baade (American, 1974)" title="Carrie Ann Baade (American, 1974)"> </a> </div> <h6 class="name"> <a href="/Artist/Carrie-Ann-Baade/7F6E7FDC64F35632" class="link"> Carrie Ann Baade </a> </h6> <span class="gray-light artist-city-align"> American, 1974</span><br /> <br /> <div class="follow-container block text-center"> <a class="btn-follow btn-theme btn-theme-block" data-mixpanel='{ "Entity ID":"7F6E7FDC64F35632", "Entity Type":"Person" }' data-gtm="event,click FOLLOW"href="/Signup?command=follow-7F6E7FDC64F35632&source_page=Article&cta=Follow" >FOLLOW</a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="homepage_artists_spaceing text-center col-xs-6 col-sm-4 col-md-3 col-lg-3"> <div class="item-content"> <div class="tac"> <a class="img-block" href="/Artist/Pieter-Brueghel-the-Elder/AB1E4D6C1C45ACD4"> <img loading="lazy" src="https://media.mutualart.com/Images/2009_02/22/0020/20270/20270_09042baf-1cbe-4fc2-adbc-1385e7027784_8149_273.Jpeg" alt="Pieter Brueghel the Elder (Flemish, Circa 1525 - 1569)" title="Pieter Brueghel the Elder (Flemish, Circa 1525 - 1569)"> </a> </div> <h6 class="name"> <a href="/Artist/Pieter-Brueghel-the-Elder/AB1E4D6C1C45ACD4" class="link"> Pieter Brueghel the Elder </a> </h6> <span class="gray-light artist-city-align"> Flemish, Circa 1525 - 1569</span><br /> <br /> <div class="follow-container block text-center"> <a class="btn-follow btn-theme btn-theme-block" data-mixpanel='{ "Entity ID":"AB1E4D6C1C45ACD4", "Entity Type":"Person" }' data-gtm="event,click FOLLOW"href="/Signup?command=follow-AB1E4D6C1C45ACD4&source_page=Article&cta=Follow" >FOLLOW</a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="homepage_artists_spaceing text-center col-xs-6 col-sm-4 col-md-3 col-lg-3"> <div class="item-content"> <div class="tac"> <a class="img-block" href="/Artist/Scott-Eagle/1623C27CC90E776B"> <img loading="lazy" src="https://media.mutualart.com/Images/2019_06/13/15/152820699/81a9abae-a55f-41c0-b2d0-0b416e1d695e_273.Jpeg" alt="Scott Eagle (American, 20th Century)" title="Scott Eagle (American, 20th Century)"> </a> </div> <h6 class="name"> <a href="/Artist/Scott-Eagle/1623C27CC90E776B" class="link"> Scott Eagle </a> </h6> <span class="gray-light artist-city-align"> American, 20th Century</span><br /> <br /> <div class="follow-container block text-center"> <a class="btn-follow btn-theme btn-theme-block" data-mixpanel='{ "Entity ID":"1623C27CC90E776B", "Entity Type":"Person" }' data-gtm="event,click FOLLOW"href="/Signup?command=follow-1623C27CC90E776B&source_page=Article&cta=Follow" >FOLLOW</a> </div> </div> </div>  </div> </div> <script> $(document).ready(function () { slickOn('.rel-articles-slider'); 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Jeff VanderMeer鈥檚 Annihilation (Part III)