Communication & Connection in Veniss Underground

I am a sycophantic reader of all things Jeff Vandermeer. Vandermeer’s linguistic deconstructionism and fascination with biological singularity (the light at the end of the tunnel where the crawler writes throughout the Southern Reach Trilogy, the way Dead Astronauts reprograms your brain if you let the blue fox see you through such a tangible lens) has provided me with quite the stomach for gore. As Duncan Shriek is distilled to spores before our very eyes, as Martin Lake’s hyper sensitivity to anatomy guides the reader along a knife’s edge, I increasingly ambivalent to horror as an empathic set of circumstance—it’s a biological reality that, so unforgivably visceral, offers no space for avoidance. It’s the organic panic, the one fundamental truth, and I was silly enough to believe that I had taken that to heart. Afterall, I adopted the pseudonym of John Rodriguez as my online-call-card (Control, or for my non copyright creative variation—k0nt701)

Oh how the mighty doth fall.

When I say that Veniss Underground made me feel physically ill, I mean it in the most complimentary, chef’s kiss, absolutely brilliant way imaginable.

Veniss Underground performed evolutionary acrobatics as it moved in and out of connection clarity. The stunning phantasmagoria projected against an unwilling landscape of waste and degradation dragged icons from their graves and spat them back out, disheveled and masticated, onto a canvas so deconstructed that it only held their phantoms. The shadow of a meerkat’s head. The biological catastrophe suffered by Nicholas, engendered by transgression of course—but such a bastardization of form yanks the already perpetually loosed Lacanian ties that we have to the subjectivity. Vandermeer’s insistence on such a sliced thread, to me, screams of a deep insistence on the split subjectivity. Such a narrative, such an image digests the mind’s methodology of physiological communication with its own body—we’re left with bile and sludge, which for Vandermeer, provides a far more negotiable signaling system. I’m trying not to give too much away here, but there is a lot to be said about Vandermeer’s flirtation with the gorey psycho-cyberpunk concatenation produced in his latest novel.

Let’s talk about it. If you read Veniss Underground, shoot me an email, or DM the instagram.

XO

-C