Jeff VanderMeers Absolution The Posthuman Animal and I

Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy has a novel addition to what some scholars have dubbed “ecocritical posthumanism” (Vinci). The new novel, Absolution, takes readers to a time before Area X, before the Biologist saw the boar’s “inner torment”, before Control met “Ghost Bird”, and before the “Crawler” slithered through the disorienting bog that is Area X. The novel’s plethora of altered animals, flora and fauna give the narrative its posthuman sheen. Human hubris is not absent from the novel’s depiction of how Biologists analyze the area and work to understand its mysteries. Alphonso Lingis’ chapter “Animal Body, Inhuman Face” posits that we are attuned to other species around us when we see ourselves as non-teleological—not intentional. When read in partnership with Lingis’s chapter “Animal Body, Inhuman Face,” VanderMeer’s SR world seems more accessible, more alive. My paper “Absolution: The Posthuman Animal and I” takes the representation of animals altered by neo-biological advance technology as fodder to explore symbiotic relationships between and around posthuman animal and nonhuman animal. The interplay between this alien technology and the human psyche crafts a narrative that challenges the reader to circumvent imaginings or how they navigate the Anthropocene environment.

Works Cited:

Lingis, Alphonso. “Animal Body, Inhuman Face.” Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, edited by Cary Wolfe, University of Minnesota Press, 2003, pp. 165-182. VanderMeer, Jeff. Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. VanderMeer, Jeff. Absolution. MCD / FSG, 2024. Vinci, Toni. “Posthumanist Sentimentality: Trauma, Sympathy, and Witnessing in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Strange Bird.” Extrapolation, vol. 64, no. 3, Dec. 2023, pp. 373-389.