This is what gives the book its mythic power: it speaks to age old questions of human culture on several levels at once. The imagery in Annihilation functions on such a deeply metaphoric level that it represents the place where these two ideas, of nature and the subconscious, join together. Our cultural debate about the relationship between conscious intelligence and the subconscious mind is directly analogous to our debate about the relationship between mankind and the natural world, as observed by Terrance McKenna and many other writers. The book is about both these things, and in fact some key images in the book draw attention to the connections between the subjects of writing, the subconscious, and our relationship with Nature. Vandermeer has made clear in other interviews that he sees the book as being about the relationship, broadly speaking, between Nature and The Human, and the nature imagery in the book supports this view equally well. That the central imagery and text for the book is taken directly from one of Vandermeer’s dreams exemplifies this idea. The book itself is an impassioned argument in favor of this kind of writing. Vandermeer, as editor and teacher as well as author, espouses the idea that writers should work with a healthy dose of the intuitive and without overanalyzing a story, so it makes sense that he might not be conscious of everything implied by his book. Jeff Vandermeer said in an interview (after coyly claiming that there’s “probably no such a thing as a misreading” of the book) that the notion of Annihilation as an extended metaphor for the writing process is “not supported in the text,” and that the idea “cracks him up” and makes him “very giggly.” This is a striking example of the familiar observation that writers do not understand their own books, because every page of Annihilation supports the metaphor of the Crawler as a writer figure, and of Area X as the realm of intuition and the subconscious from which a writer must draw his work. I haven’t yet read the second two books in the Southern Reach Trilogy, so this article doesn’t take them into account.)
(This analysis is about Jeff Vandermeer’s book Annihilation, not the movie loosely based on the book.
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