“THE SEEDS OF THIS CONVERSATION were planted when I saw an online announcement for Timothy Morton’s new book, Dark Ecology. Immediately I felt the cover design resonated with the amazing covers of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. When I mentioned this to Tim at an academic conference, he said it was a sort of lovely and weird coincidence because he and Jeff had recently started communicating with each other — appreciating each other’s work, ideas, and aesthetics.”
“Soon after, Gerry Canavan and I started collaborating on “Global Weirding,” a special issue of the academic journal Paradoxa, and we agreed that Jeff and Tim would make an engaging and provocative pair to feature in conversation with each other.”
“In many ways, they both have a magical ability to produce extremely edgy and sophisticated work capable of reaching wide audiences well beyond academic and/or genre fiction coteries.”
“Fortunately, they agreed to meet via Skype one morning in the summer of 2016. I opened the conversation by asking them to start with a statement on what they found engaging and illuminating in the other’s work and how they envision their work intersecting, and then I quietly recorded and observed as their friendly, loopy conversation veered around through Beatrix Potter, Surrealism, childhood experiences with tidal pools, fur-shedding cats, and uncanny orange juice.”
“TIM MORTON: There’s a very, very strong overall feeling about the work that you do, Jeff. There’s a very dreamlike quality to it, and I like this quality very much. If I was going to use a word to describe it, I’d probably use Freud’s word “displacement.””
“JEFF VANDERMEER: The interesting thing is I’m very much a writer who is both organic and mechanical. I believe in getting down a draft, which is very influenced by the subconscious, and then peering through it. After I wrote Annihilation, I started seeing reviews that mentioned your work in connection with it; that’s why I picked up Hyperobjects, and the thing that was fascinating to me is that it appealed to both the organic and the mechanical sides. The mechanical side made me understand what I had written better because the very term “hyperobject” kind of encapsulated what was going on organically in Annihilation.”
“I always go through this process in which I have to trust my subconscious first, and I then have to understand what it was that I did, and then my fiction is informed by all of that; your book really helped me with that, which is really important in this context where I’m fairly sure there isn’t going to be a novel I write going forward that doesn’t deal with ecological themes in some way.”
“TM: Right on. I think we’re both dealing with trying to access internal things that are very hard to put into words.”
“JVM: Absolutely. I’m also a big believer in trying to bring the reader or viewer back to understanding that the under-meaning of what they think is mundane is not really that mundane and is also incredibly complex.”
“JVM: I think the thing that I find fascinating too, at least here in north Florida, is that the distinction between inside and outside becomes corrupted, which is a really fascinating thing about Florida. We have this invasion of these little tiny pink geckos that coat the outside of the house now. They get inside the house; you don’t know how. You get insects inside the house no matter what you do, no matter how careful you are. If you really think about it, there’s this porous quality. Our bodies are porous first of all, we have tons of microbes on top of us and whatnot. Then our actual houses are porous in ways that we don’t always want to recognize. I find that also speaks to this whole issue of complexity and how we view the world that I think feeds into hyperobjects, too.”
“TM: It so does. I love this idea of porosity actually.”
“TM: These worlds are actually perforated, which is why we can communicate with each other; and yet there’s this idea that we all live in these totally shrink-wrapped worlds with this very strong inside/outside distinction.”
“TM: Jean-François Lyotard. He’s got this thing where he’s basically saying something similar, he calls it figure versus discourse. Discourse is like how we think things are meaningful, and figure is, I don’t know, kind of physical in a very expanded sense — qualities of words and sentences and whatever kind of leaks through all the time. The boundary there is very spongy. And it is on a sentence level. You have to let sentences do that. Otherwise, what’s the point? From a certain point of view, in my line of work, why would I want to write about something that I already think I totally know?”
“This is an edited excerpt from a larger conversation that can be found in Paradoxa 28 (2016), a special issue on “Global Weirding” that explores intersections between climate change phenomena and weird fiction. Kind thanks to Jeff and Ann VanderMeer for underwriting the initial transcription of this conversation, and thanks as well to the contributors and Paradoxa editors for their permission to publish the excerpt here.”
“Andrew Hageman is assistant professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where he researches and teaches the intersections of ecology and techno-culture in literature, film, and the arts.”