In Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Authority, a moment of anagnorisis occurs when Control, the director of the Southern Reach Agency, reaches out to open a door:

In this moment, Control realises that the mysterious Area X they have been studying is not contained, as he believed, beyond a border guarded by military forces. Area X is already inside the Agency’s building, and the building inside Area X. The director’s fumbling hand symbolises the displacement at work throughout the Southern Reach trilogy: agency is not where we think it is, and control does not lie in human hands. In the last sentence here, the human is reduced from the subject of action to the adverbial clause of place, while space becomes a living and grammatical subject. As for transitive syntax, it vanishes with the handle.

Against the backdrop of environmental catastrophe, the novels I examine in this chapter use multi-scalar poetics to question the idea of autonomous human action – a conception of agency which, as I set out in Chapter 1, is increasingly viewed as a fiction by postgenomic and Anthropocene philosophy. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, which was published the year following the release of Al Gore’s documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (2006), mockingly asks whether individuals can escape the destruction wrought by their species, in complex agentive associations with other-than-humans. The Southern Reach trilogy, which VanderMeer wrote in the aftermath of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, builds a poetics of reciprocal contamination between humans and environments, where the fantasy of human control is contrasted with the agency of a mysteriously pristine region. Like the fiction examined in Chapter 2, these novels resist the ‘logic of inversion’ that isolates organisms from environments.Footnote ¹ But the radical disempowerment experienced by VanderMeer’s and Winterson’s characters foregrounds the dispersal of agency into multi-scalar assemblages and symbiotic associations. These novels’ multi-scalar poetics destabilise transitive relations to the environment, or what Latour calls the illusion of a human subject facing the object nature.

This chapter continues the reflection on mereological poetics begun in Chapter 2, and defends the necessity of re-evaluating and valuing synecdoche as environmental trope. I argue that Winterson and VanderMeer experiment with multi-scalar tropes as a means of modelling agency at unfamiliar scales, and thus enabling environmental response-ability. As Zach Horton theorises, scale is both a form of ontological difference and an epistemological construct, since we can access other scales only through mediations. Winterson’s and VanderMeer’s tropes foreground the epistemological construction of scale, and the urgent need for this construction to deal with the ontological upheaval of Anthropocene awareness. Their fiction experiments with two types of trope that mediate other-than-human scales: on the one hand, analogical images such as military maps, or the Earth as living organism; on the other, synecdoches like the sample or the footprint, which approach the whole through its fragments. Driven by the latter, these novels’ multi-scalar poetics effect a cognitive shift towards the close-up, partial view.

This chapter begins by situating my reading in the broader rhetorical context of environmental discourse and the role played by synecdoche in that discourse. This trope, I point out, is an important tool in the rhetoric of ecological responsibility because one of the main challenges of our current ecological crisis is precisely that it demands the capacity to think through disjunctions between scales. I then show that Winterson’s exploration of assemblage agency wavers between allegorical and synecdochic poetics. Through these tropes, The Stone Gods explores the epistemic value of conflicting images of species and planet: I read these conflicts with the help of Bruno Latour’s 2017 essay Down to Earth, because both Winterson and Latour explore how different images of the world, and the conceptions of agency they contain, shape the politics of global warming. Synecdoche also structures the imagination of agency in the Southern Reach trilogy. But VanderMeer’s multi-scalar poetics intertwine questions of Anthropocene response-ability with a postgenomic view of symbiotic agency. I suggest that VanderMeer’s and Winterson’s figurative poetics effect a cognitive modelling of agency at several imperceptible scales: both the macroscale of planet and species demanded by Anthropocene awareness and the microscales of postgenomic imaginaries.Footnote ² In the chapter’s final section, I define critical synecdoche as a figurative strategy that engages productively with the complexity of environmental agency and response-ability.

3.1 Synecdoche in Environmental Rhetoric

Scale theory has tended to vilify synecdoche as a trope that would negate differences between scale domains. For Joshua DiCaglio, synecdoche is a misrepresentation which ‘inappropriately subsumes a higher-scale view to a lower-scale object’, whereas scale theory works towards a ‘fully scalar view’ which ‘challenges this synecdochic assumption’.Footnote ³ Derek Woods, in his analysis of ecosystem tropes, follows Richard Lanham’s description of synecdoche as a form of scale-change where ‘[t]o define A’, we ‘equate it to a part of B, derived by magnification’.Footnote ⁴ Woods accordingly emphasises the superiority of scala that acknowledge, ‘in a way that synecdoche does not, that the scales of the part and the whole might not be self-similar’.Footnote ⁵ What this strand of scale critique elides, however, is synecdoche’s capacity to substitute without implying similarity. In the classic example of ‘asking for someone’s hand in marriage’, the figure does not suggest that the loved one is similar to a hand. When the part stands for the whole, synecdoche can imply pars totalis – a relation where the part is a miniature of the whole – but also pars pro toto – a relation where the part simply represents the whole but may not resemble it at all.Footnote ⁶ This distinction is crucial for my analysis of multi-scalar poetics because one of the main challenges of our current ecological crisis is precisely that it demands the capacity to think through disjunctions between scales – particularly the discordance between individual experience and ecosystemic threat.

Synecdoche is a recurrent feature of the discourse of environmental crisis. The rhetoric of extinction, according to Ursula Heise, is ruled by ‘a pervasive logic of what biologists usually call proxy and literary scholars call synecdoche – the part standing in for the whole’:Footnote ⁷ while the science of extinction relies on indicator species to diagnose the health of ecosystems, the discourse of conservation tends to foreground charismatic organisms which appeal more to the public than fungi or arachnids. Moreover, the topic of extinction tends to function as a proxy for cultural concerns, in a Western discursive context where ‘diversity’ has acquired a considerable amount of cultural cachet. Heise therefore suggests that species endangerment becomes a synecdoche for the evils of modernity, and biodiversity itself becomes a form of shorthand for what is valued and may be lost.Footnote ⁸ We can extend Heise’s remarks about the threat of extinction to political and journalistic discourse surrounding global heating. Particular locations such as the Maldives – an atoll nation which risks becoming uninhabitable within the twenty-first century – are often used as a synecdoche for the rest of the planet which may also become uninhabitable. In 2009, the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, held an underwater cabinet meeting to sign a declaration urging world leaders to halt global warming, stating that if the Maldives could not be saved then ‘we do not feel that there is much of a chance for the rest of the world’.Footnote ⁹ As Eric Hirsch has argued, this kind of political rhetoric construes the Maldives nation as a climate change synecdoche, ‘a place uniquely exposed to the environmental consequences of climate crisis, such as sea-level rise, that becomes a stand-in for the global crisis as a whole and a harbinger of more widespread disaster’.Footnote ¹⁰ In the rhetoric of environmental threat, synecdoche may thus reach across time as well as space: the drowning island pulls the future of the planet into the present, while the footprint trope turns damage already perpetuated by the species into a present concern for the individual. Both these images pose mereological questions that contain ethical problems: how is the part responsible for the whole? And should one part be considered an acceptable loss for the whole, a ‘sacrifice zone’ that is expendable?

In Chapter 1, I noted that a form of semiotic slippage is inherent in ecological synecdoche: one small-scale image tends to evoke a nexus of interconnected large-scale problems. Footprints are a striking example of this extended referentiality. Examining the carbon footprint’s cultural-ecological role, Anita Girvan notes that the expression appeared in the early 2000s as a way of linking ‘shifting carbon connections’ to ‘bodies across individual, national, and other scales that are part of this urgent issue of climate change’.Footnote ¹¹ Although Girvan analyses them as metaphors, footprints also function as a synecdoche, particularly in the now widespread use of the term which no longer refers only to carbon but stands in, as Nathaniel Rivers suggests, ‘for all the other ways we impact the earth’.Footnote ¹² Commenting on a photograph of a footprint in the sand used by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) website, Rivers remarks that footprint imagery conveys an intimacy and a qualitative dimension that complexify the metric logic of calculating carbon emission equivalence. Footprints are thus both metaphors for measurable environmental impact and synecdoches for many effects, not all of which are quantifiable.Footnote ¹³ As complex tropes, they function as a nexus for ecopolitical relations. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s theory of the political role of aesthetics, Girvan observes that carbon footprint discourse often reinforces a liberal order of environmentalism, leaving intact fossil-fuel-intensive systems. And yet ecological tropes act as ‘unique mediators of entangled larger-than-human relations’, which she hopes might ‘trip up’ market-oriented logic.Footnote ¹⁴ Rivers tackles the paradoxes of the image from an anthropological perspective, arguing that although the footprint-as-metric emphasises a quantitative approach to ecological impact, the footprint-as-synecdoche allows for a more qualitative approach. It might be more useful, he suggests, to focus on leaving better footprints, rather than smaller ones.

Environmental synecdoche is a rhetorical tool that carries conflicting representations and foregrounds complex ecopolitical relations. In the fiction I examine in this chapter, the footprint is one of several multi-scalar tropes that turn images of disempowerment and disorientation into a locus of relationality with other species. Both Girvan and Rivers highlight the troubling potential of the figure: quoting Donna Haraway, Girvan reminds us that ‘[t]ropes swerve […]: they make plain that to make sense we must always be ready to trip’.Footnote ¹⁵ In my reading of The Stone Gods and the Southern Reach trilogy, I foreground this ‘swerving’ of synecdoche, its critical potential, and the space it opens up for response-ability between human and nonhuman scales of life.

3.2 Ironic Figures of Multi-scalar Agency in The Stone Gods

The opening sentence of The Stone Gods announces a curious measurement: ‘[t]his new world weighs a yatto-gram’ (3). Without explaining what a yatto-gram might be, the narrator proceeds to describe the surprising dimensions of everything this world contains:

In a review of The Stone Gods, Ursula Le Guin regrets the ‘meaningless flourish’ of Winterson’s first sentence, and the ‘fancy writing’ that indulges, a few lines further on, in evoking ‘[e]ggs, pale-blue-shelled, each the weight of a breaking universe’.Footnote ¹⁶ Fortunately, Le Guin notes, Winterson ‘gets done’ with most of that early on, and then gets on with telling her story. Indeed, after the first few paragraphs, the scene shifts to a public presentation of this new world by the Central Power of Orbus, a dying planet, and the announcement of its decision to colonise the pristine Planet Blue. The lyrical description, it seems, was a mental commentary by the narrator, Billie Crusoe, whose public speech is much more straightforward, selling the promise of survival brought by a new planet while warning the audience of the presence of dinosaurs. I disagree, however, with Le Guin because I find that the opening, scale-bending images are crucial to the story Winterson is telling, a story which presents ecological catastrophe as an epistemic and imaginative failure – the direct result of the images through which we view the world. The novel’s first page counters this failure, and the distanced, colonising view of Planet Blue, with Billie’s close-up description of embedded life. It also draws our attention, through its repeated use of the conjunctions ‘as’ and ‘like’, to our tendency to picture unfamiliar scales through analogy.

Just as life on Planet Blue disrupts familiar scales, the ‘yatto-gram’ is a distortion of the unit ‘yottagram’, a million million million million grams. I read these inversions and distortions of scale as a sign of the ‘derangements of scale’ that Clark associates with Anthropocene awareness. Since the scale effects of individual actions – the effects of that behaviour on the scale of a whole species – are difficult to perceive, Clark has suggested that ‘[h]uman agency becomes, as it were, displaced from within by its own act, a kind of demonic iterability’.Footnote ¹⁷ This formulation resonates with Winterson’s recursive prose, where haunting effects are produced by the return of characters and textual fragments. Lines from John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rises’, Auden’s ‘In Sickness and in Health’, and Captain Cook’s journal, as well as the narrators’ repeated musings on ‘The new world – El Dorado, Atlantis, the Gold Coast, New-foundland, Plymouth Rock, Rapanaui, Utopia, Planet Blue’ (8), all recur throughout the three narratives that compose the novel. In each of these, a character named Billie or Billy Crusoe finds themselves shipwrecked or cast off from their society, in landscapes damaged by human hands. Although the first narrator takes part in the terraforming expedition, the mission soon results in planetary climate catastrophe, leaving them stranded on Planet Blue with the mission’s Robo sapiens, Spike. In the second section, the narrator is a member of Captain Cook’s crew, abandoned on Easter Island, where they discover a barren, depleted environment whose inhabitants have destroyed all trees in the worshipping of their stone god. The third and fourth sections take place on Earth, in Tech City and Wreck City, the two faces of London after a nuclear third world war. The narrator, who works as a Robo sapiens educator, leaves the safety of Tech City and explores the wreckage of the city’s fringe and the dead forest beyond it, until they are shot for the theft of the Robo sapiens. As Mahlu Mertens and Stef Craps point out, the echoing between characters creates a kind of Doppelgänger effect, enacting the haunted feeling that Clark identifies as Anthropocene awareness.Footnote ¹⁸ My reading, however, focuses on the ways in which the plot of the novel is haunted by the allegorical mode. This mode, I suggest, both enables and hinders trans-scalar ethics.

The Stone Gods plays with several allegorical figurations of both humanity and the planet. The opening pages hint at a Gaian view of the biosphere: when asked whether Planet Blue contains ‘intelligent life’, Billie responds that it ‘[d]epends what you mean by intelligent. There is something there, yes, and it’s very big and very good at its job’ (3). This holistic view of the living environment is strengthened by organicist descriptions of ecological destruction as bodily damage: after a meteor strikes the planet, it appears to the narrator to be ‘purple and red, livid, raw, exposed, like a gutted thing’ (101). Across the three narratives, the planet is also repeatedly personified by a recurrent line from John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’, ‘She is all States, all Princes I […]’, which positions the new worlds of each narrative as objects of desire. In the first narrative, these lines accompany the image of Planet Blue viewed from space, but also the narrator’s growing love for the Robo sapiens Spike. The conflation of human, machine, and planet is made explicit as death approaches: while the dying Spike predicts that humanity’s first love poem will be written ‘when someone finds that the stretch of the body-beloved is the landmass of the world’ (110), Billie holds her severed head, calling it ‘[t]his new world that I found’ (112). By erasing the boundaries that separate planet, body, and robot, Winterson’s love stories take the Gaian imaginary in the cyborg direction explored by Haraway, who describes Lovelock’s earth as ‘itself a cyborg, a complex auto-poietic system that terminally blurred the boundaries among the geological, the organic, and the technological’.Footnote ¹⁹ As for humanity, it is represented allegorically by the successive narrators: the simple narrative that emerges from their tales is that by destroying its environment, humanity repeatedly shipwrecks itself. The nightmarish ‘long-toed clawprints’ described on the first page are both analeptic and proleptic: they echo the already monstrous ecological footprint of Orbus and they announce that Orbus’s effect on Planet Blue will be equally disastrous. They also recall the seminal scene in which Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe, after many years spent on an island, discovers Friday’s footprint in the sand, a trace which leaves him ‘terrified to the last degree’.Footnote ²⁰ Framed by the scalar instability of Planet Blue, the clawprint announces humanity’s confrontation with its own monstrous agency and responsibility.

The long-toed clawprint, however, also dehumanises the classic environmental trope of the footprint, morphing the ‘toe’ of the adjective into a ‘claw’ in the noun. As this image hints, agency is not the attribute of one species only. In fact, it is humanity’s inadequate conception of agency that is the source of the environmental destruction portrayed in the novel. In an attempt to escape prosecution for ecologically motivated terrorism, the first narrator joins the expedition that is leaving the collapsing biosphere of Orbus. Their mission is to destroy the dinosaurs on Planet Blue, to make it habitable for humans, so they redirect an asteroid towards the planet to create a sufficient disruption. But, owing to a ‘mistake’ (91), the deflected asteroid moves faster than planned, and hits a crater hidden under the sea, covering the pristine planet with clouds of sulphur dioxide which, in effect, trigger an ice age. ‘We intended months,’ the Robo sapiens explains, but the disruption ‘is at a much greater magnitude than we predicted. It may be years – perhaps decades’ (91). The ‘mistake’ then is not only one of scale but a failure to account for the complex assemblage in which human agency is entangled, an assemblage that involves man and machine, meteorite and volcano, sea and atmosphere, sulphur and oxygen. Winterson’s satirical portrayal of unintended terraforming confirms Woods’s assertion that the ‘scale-critical’ subject of the Anthropocene ‘is not “our species” but the sum of terraforming assemblages composed of humans, nonhuman species, and technics’.Footnote ²¹ These assemblages traverse scale domains: if humanity is a geophysical force, this force is not the expression of human agency but ‘the emergent property of operations in discontinuous scale domains’.Footnote ²² In The Stone Gods, humanity’s miscalculations are a failure of trans-scalar thought, a repeated inability to predict such emergent properties: in the second narrative, deforestation is a complex catastrophe, linked not only to agriculture but to infestations by palm-nut-eating rats, and to the erection of idols for which vast amounts of wood are necessary.

This shift of agency from single species to assemblage troubles allegorical reading. The allegorical substitution of individual for species becomes problematic because such a substitution obfuscates the complex interplay of forces that occurs across the different scale domains of Anthropocene agency. Dipesh Chakrabarty pinpoints this problem as inherent to reflections on Anthropocene responsibility, since the search for a politically responsible agent ‘substitutes for the very distributed agency […] of Earth processes, technology, humans and other species some kind of an autonomous figure of agency (whether it is a unified figure of humanity or a particular class does not matter) to which both culpability and responsibility may be assigned’.Footnote ²³ This simplification, Chakrabarty points out, hides the fact that the agent thus defined is ‘always in a relationship of synecdoche to the distributed agency of the Earth processes’. Drawing on that insight, I suggest that Winterson’s multi-scalar poetics emphasise this synecdochic relation, forcing us to re-evaluate analogical connections between scales as discordant, part-for-whole substitutions. The narrators waver between the allegorical feeling that they represent their species’ shipwrecking habits – ‘what am I’, asks the second narrator, ‘but a Ship in little’ (131) – and the critical distance that alienates them from humanity. Such microcosmic images echo those of Winterson’s earlier novel Gut Symmetries, in which the recurrent phrase is ‘What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millennia, the expanding universe opening in your gut’.Footnote ²⁴ But Winterson’s multi-scalar poetics are more troubled in The Stone Gods, where microcosmic images emphasise dissonance within synecdochic representation. The first narrator lives on a ‘bio-dome’ farm, where life ‘fills every bit of uncultivated hedge’ and the soil is full of ‘burrows, tunnels, nests, tree-hollows, wasp-balls, drilled-out holes of the water voles, otter sticks, toad stones, mice riddling the dry-stone walls, badger setts, molehills, fox dens, rabbit warrens, stoats brown in summer, ermine in winter, clean as bullets through the bank’ (13–14). A homage to Darwin’s tangled bank, this microcosm stands at odds with the macrocosm of Orbus, where it is considered archaic and dangerous: soon Billie is evicted, and the farm destroyed. Winterson’s farm is comparable to the gardens that resist capitalist scalability in Gardens in the Dunes. But whereas Silko’s fragile utopia views the garden as a space of ongoing adaptation and common subsistence, Winterson’s dystopia describes the farm as a memory, a piece of a past ecology whose synecdochic relation to the planet is strongly discordant.

The allegorical figuration of the planet as a beloved body is questioned throughout the novel by a Gaian view of agency. As Latour has argued, Gaia theory presents a challenge to a transitive syntax of agency because agency becomes a complex system of multiple feedback loops. In this perspective, every living agent is involved in waves of action which traverse scales.Footnote ²⁵ The ice age triggered by the humans in The Stone Gods is one such wave of action: a dramatic illustration, in an accelerated form, of the feedback loops that constitute Gaian agency. Indeed, the loop itself is such a key form in Winterson’s recursive novel that Marco Caracciolo views it as a ‘a spatial model for the logic of the narrative, uncoupling […] the progression of the story from any sense of overarching human intentionality’,Footnote ²⁶ until the loop itself becomes a narrative actant, enabling a move away from anthropocentrism. While I agree that intentionality is mocked by the novel, I want to complexify this actantial reading through the response of the human to the planet. Winterson chooses to personify the Earth as a dying cyborg whose head the narrator ends up carrying in both the first and the last narrative. This Earth as severed head is markedly different from the Paracelsian correspondences between body and universe that Winterson explored in Gut Symmetries. In The Stone Gods, individual and species, organism and environment, are linked no longer by the reassuring analogies of pars totalis but by the semiotic slippages of pars pro toto: the unpredictable footprint that morphs into a clawprint, the idyllic farmhouse that positions the oikos of ecology in complete contradiction with its globalised environment, and the severed head of the beloved cyborg/world. This image mocks the transitive syntax of Donne’s poem and of the Atlas myth – the idea that the Earth is loved and carried as an object. But it also preserves a degree of human agency in the act of care and carrying: the trope, in other words, is in itself a site of response-ability towards the planet.

These geo-aesthetics inscribe The Stone Gods in the ‘planetary turn’ that was occurring in literature and philosophy in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The decaying worlds described in the first and third narratives are satires of late capitalism: Winterson, like Chakrabarty or Spivak, uses the entangled living planet as a resistance to the consumerist globe. But I am particularly interested in her choice of fragments as images of that planet. This fragmentation nuances the novel’s allegorical poetics with partial, incomplete views, a shift that I will analyse here through Latour’s concept of the Terrestrial. Latour’s essay Down to Earth takes as its premise a generalised loss of ‘bearings’, and the urgent necessity of orientation: ‘To resist this loss of a common orientation, we shall have to come down to earth; we shall have to land somewhere. […] And to do this we need something like a map of the positions imposed by the new landscape within which not only the affects of public life but also its stakes are being redefined.’Footnote ²⁷ In Latour’s analysis, the current political crisis is polarised by conflicting visions of the Earth. He proposes a map in which four conceptions of the world function as attractors: in addition to the Local and the Global, Latour suggests that climate change denial has introduced a third pole, the Out-of-This-World, ‘the horizon of people who no longer belong to the realities of an earth that would react to their actions’.Footnote ²⁸ In contrast to that delusion, Latour argues that a fourth pole, which he calls the Terrestrial, needs to emerge. In Winterson’s novel, the repeating narrative enacts the failure of the first three poles identified by Latour. The first narrator’s Globe is on the verge of collapse, ‘throwing up’ her guts in the form of red sandstorms (68), and the ideal of the Local fares no better, since Billie is evicted from her bio-dome and the farm destroyed. Planet Blue, meanwhile, can be described as the Out-of-This-World attractor, of which Latour remarks that it expresses the political desire to place oneself ‘literally offshore, like a tax haven’.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, the terraforming mission to Planet Blue is soon revealed to be intended only for the benefit of the wealthiest inhabitants of Orbus.Footnote ³⁰ Ironically, the third narrative picks up the Out-of-This-World theme when a radio telescope captures a message from outer space, bouncing off the moon. The message, it turns out, comes not from another planet but from the past of planet Earth, where the unfortunate terraformers of the first narrative had landed. In other words, the novel’s planetary poetics have set up an epistemic trap: not only is there only one planet but this planet is the dystopian underside of the utopia promised by the politics of denial. We are always already on Planet Blue.

Winterson’s planetary poetics anticipate the shift of perspective formulated by Latour. Both texts explore a necessary shift from the external, distanced point of view to a view from inside, from within the turmoil and interconnected cycles of Anthropocene agency. Winterson’s first narrator soon realises that the images of Planet Blue’s ‘empty beauty’ (15) projected on Orbus are a trap. The reality is ‘a jungle dense as night’, filled with ‘whistles and whoops, yelps and cries of creatures we had never even had nightmares about’ (84). When the mission backfires, Billie’s decision to stay behind is a choice of this confusing, close-up perspective: at the cost of their own life, they experience intimately the swift reaction of the system to human action. By leaving the ship, they abandon the view from space that Latour calls the Galilean view, where ‘to know is to know from the outside’.Footnote ³¹ For Latour, relinquishing that position is an essential step towards understanding the complexity of terrestrial agency. From this perspective, Winterson’s shipwrecked characters are placed in an advantageous epistemic position: they plunge into the turmoil, or, in Latour’s terms, they abandon the Globe, which ‘grasps all things from far away’, and embrace the Terrestrial perspective, perceiving ‘structures from up close, as […] sensitive to human actions, to which they react swiftly’.Footnote ³² In the second narrative, the renouncement of the Globe is thrust upon the narrator when they are left behind by the expedition whose mission was ‘to discover the Southern Continent, if such a place there be, and to make a Map, and to claim Land for the Crown’ (131). As for the third narrator, they choose to leave the safety of Tech City for Wreck City and the radioactive forest that borders it. All Winterson’s narrators thus walk away from the mapping and terraforming projects of the Globe, towards a murky, synecdochic view of the Terrestrial.

3.3 Figures of Symbiotic and Autopoietic Agency in the Southern Reach Trilogy

Like The Stone Gods, the Southern Reach trilogy destabilises transitive relations to the environment by confronting humans with the dispersal of agency across many different scales. At first, the narration seems to encourage the ‘illusion’ of a human subject facing the object nature. The trilogy follows a series of expeditions into Area X, after an unnamed event creates a border between this section of a ‘forgotten coast’ and the rest of the world (Acceptance, 97). The narrator of the first novel, Annihilation, a biologist who believes she is part of the twelfth expedition, is amazed by its purity. Area X, it seems, contains no traces of the Anthropocene: in the second volume, Authority, the narrator named ‘Control’ learns that hundreds of samples reveal ‘no trace of human-created toxicity […]. No heavy metals. No industrial runoff or agricultural runoff. No plastics. Which was impossible’ (Authority, 125). Although located in a coastal region somewhere in North America, VanderMeer’s Area X seems to share the ‘pristine’ quality of Winterson’s Planet Blue – a quality that twenty-first-century ecofiction renders suspect.Footnote ³³ The term soon triggers Control’s suspicion, as it returns over and over again in descriptions of the area. After his first day as director of the Southern Reach Agency, he reflects that the members of expeditions into the area must have been conditioned to perceive it as such. Behind this ‘fiction of encountering an undisturbed wilderness’ (40), the agency hides the strangeness of the environment and the terrible fate not only of previous expeditions but of the former inhabitants of the area, whose suffering is revealed in a nightmarish analepsis at the end of the final volume, Acceptance.Footnote ³⁴ What the trilogy gradually reveals is that the ‘fiction’ is not just the existence of ‘undisturbed’ wilderness but the transitive idea of humanity ‘encountering’ nature.

Area X, as Woods remarks, is reminiscent of Chernobyl as well as of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979), where an expedition enters ‘“the zone”, a mysterious place of idyllic fields, forests, and ruins haunted by a psychoactive force’.Footnote ³⁵ VanderMeer’s trilogy belongs to the developing trend of ecohorror, a mode which reacts to an ecological crisis where ‘horror is becoming the environmental norm’.Footnote ³⁶ Sitting in the local bar, Control pictures the remains of an Indian settlement under the department store and, farther down, ‘the crushed remains of so many creatures, loamed into the soil, pushed down by the foundations of the buildings’ (Authority, 240, my highlighting). The image toys with the concept of deep time: geological layers are not just invisible but forcefully hidden by the crushing layers of the Anthropocene. The ‘untouched wilderness’ of Area X, then, is as fictional as the rest of America’s wilderness: as Timothy Morton puts it, ‘[t]here is no “pristine,” no Nature, only history’.Footnote ³⁷ That history, however, is not only the result of human action: with the expression ‘loamed into the soil’, VanderMeer turns the noun ‘loam’ into a geological verb, the creation of loam through decomposition, so that the grammatical subject is ambiguous, hovering between the loam itself and the buildings. In passages related by the biologist, other words related to the land occupy similarly ambiguous functions: ‘when you see beauty in desolation’, she remarks, ‘it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you’ (Annihilation, 6). Here desolation shifts from circumstance to subject, preparing the narrator for the ‘dislocation’ she experiences in Area X (97). These grammatical shifts do more than express the disorientation typical of weird fiction:Footnote ³⁸ by translating epistemic upheaval into syntax, they enact the dispersal of agency.

Over the three volumes, Area X is gradually revealed to be a living, autopoietic system which resembles Margulis’s definition of Gaia as ‘an emergent, recursive form of self-production and self-maintenance’.Footnote ³⁹ Like the mission to Planet Blue portrayed in The Stone Gods, expeditions into Area X are soon confronted with the inadequacy of their syntax of action. In the first volume, the expedition encounters a tunnel or tower that does not appear on their map. On the walls of what she perceives as an underground tower, the biologist observes writing composed by a type of fungi, ‘symbiotic fruiting bodies from a species unknown’ (26). After she inhales one of the spores emitted by these fungi, she experiences her contamination by Area X as a gradual transformation by an internal brightness. In contrast to the biologist’s acceptance of this symbiotic dispersal of agency, Control approaches it through conflict and resistance. But his resistance is troubled by his feelings for the version of the biologist he encounters – a clone produced by Area X who calls herself Ghost Bird. In the third volume, the narrative looks backwards, to the futile resistance of the lighthouse keeper who channelled the initial ‘event’ of Area X, and forwards, to Control and Ghost Bird travelling together through a rapidly expanding Area X. Here they encounter Grace, a former assistant director now entrenched in guerilla defence against her environment, and the original biologist, now transformed into a moving, conscious, living mountain – a living refutation of the dichotomy between the human subject and its objectified environment.

VanderMeer thematises the necessity of cognitive reorientation through numerous references to maps. From the start, the biologist insists on the inadequacy of the maps they have been given. Focusing mostly on a camp, a lighthouse, and the path that leads from one to the other, these maps caricature what behavioural geographers call a cognitive map: a visual representation of an individual’s knowledge of an area, where ‘landmarks are discrete occurrences (objects) in the environment’ and ‘route knowledge is developed by stringing landmarks together’.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the second volume, Control embodies the paranoid version of the cognitive disorientation experienced by all the characters. His obsessive search for the whole pattern in the detail provides an acute awareness of synecdochic, pars pro toto relations. In his final confrontation with Area X, Control feels ‘an overwhelming feeling of connection, that nothing was truly apart in the same way that he had found even the most random scrawl in the director’s notes joined some greater pattern’ (Acceptance, 311). Here the manic semiosis of paranoia leads to the ontological revelation of the radical entanglement of life forms. Of all the characters, he goes farthest down the mysterious tower, refusing to turn back until, ‘no longer entirely human’, he leaps into the blinding light at the bottom.

The trilogy’s multi-scalar tropes are crucial tools in this cognitive disorientation and reorientation because they enable an alternative cognitive modelling of agency which, unlike the map, is not confined to a single scale. The first novel draws attention to cognitive modelling by contrasting conflicting images of the same environment. Through the paradox of the tower/tunnel, VanderMeer blurs the ontological mapping of space that Johnson and Lakoff associate with verticality:Footnote ⁴¹ whereas the other members perceive a descent, a movement which we associate ontologically with illness and decline, the biologist sees an ascending space, a movement associated with health and life. In her first description of this tower, this confusion of height with depth is accentuated by the living words being described as both a forest and an ocean:

In this narration, the use of inverted commas draws attention to the cognitive modelling effected by tropes. The description hesitates between the microcosmic images of entire ecosystems – the forest, the ocean – and the fragmented image of bodiless hands. A classic symbol of agency, the hands emphasise that agency is here displaced away from the human. Its attribution to fungi, which are both an ‘organism’ and a source of ‘loam’, further diffuses this agency into an environment that is not distinguishable from the organisms that compose it. This conflation of organism with environment is soon confirmed, when upon her second entry into the tower, the biologist perceives its ‘breathing’ and realises that she is in ‘an organism that might contain a mysterious second organism, which was itself using yet other organisms to write words on the wall’ (51).

What kind of cognitive modelling does this image enable? It clearly locates agency in matter, since the paradoxical image of words made of hands overlays the agent of writing with the material of writing, effectively rendering agency and materiality undistinguishable. But the inscription of this writing in a symbiotic, spiral-shaped organism produces a striking image of postgenomic agency: the words on the wall are transcribed into living flesh, just as the DNA within the human body is transcribed into human flesh, within cells that were originally produced by symbiosis between microscopic living organisms.Footnote ⁴² As Lara Choksey points out, the script on the wall is a ‘meta-genomic’ image, where script is encoded by another script.Footnote ⁴³ The fungal words, moreover, have several overlapping layers which the biologist perceives as variations and ‘ghost scripts’ (48): like the human genome, the writing in the tower mutates. The uncanny tower, as strange as it may be, is no stranger than the interior of a human cell, whose microscopic DNA contains the deep time of evolution.

The images through which the agency of Area X is described are thus steeped in a biological imaginary of symbiosis, genetic replication, and genomic mutation. As she transforms, the biologist feels that she is being rewritten from within by her contamination. The spiral of the tower stairs is answered by the spiral of lighthouse stairs she climbs later in the novel, and this double helix is echoed in the third volume, when the original contamination occurs: attracted by a glint in the grass, the lighthouse keeper touches a glowing plant that contains a ‘tiny shifting spiral of light’, and feels a ‘sliver’ enter his thumb (Acceptance, 25), triggering the transformation of the entire coast. Area X’s ability to genetically replicate living organisms recalls H. P. Lovecraft’s horrific shoggoth, a ‘[f]ormless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms of organs and processes’,Footnote ⁴⁴ but the symbiotic dynamics portrayed by VanderMeer are distinctly postgenomic. The rapid transformation of life within Area X reflects the shift of evolutionary theory towards a ‘story of collectives’, whose main actors are processes rather than separate organisms.Footnote ⁴⁵ And at the heart of Area X the genomic writing is composed of fungi, one of the early twenty-first century’s key figures for biological entanglement.Footnote ⁴⁶

The trilogy contains three striking figurative bodies that I view as experiments in the cognitive modelling of multi-scalar agency. The first is the tower. The second is the writer of the words on the tower wall, a figure whom the biologist calls the Crawler. The third is the biologist herself, once she turns into a living landscape. The fungal, living code at the heart of the tower introduces what Woods identifies as a fundamental scalar indeterminacy:Footnote ⁴⁷ fungal bodies are not locatable on one scale because they exist spatially beneath and inside us, spreading invisibly through underground mycelia and overground spores, and behaving like a digestive system turned inside out. Scalar indeterminacy is in fact a characteristic of all three figures. While the tower conflates the scale of organisms with that of DNA, the Crawler and the biologist-turned-mountain compress the microscopic with the planetary, and the organic timescale with the geological timescale. In the climatic descent into the tower that concludes Acceptance, the Crawler appears to Ghost Bird as a ‘bell-shaped body’ with a translucent surface ‘like a microscope slide of certain kinds of long, irregularly shaped cells’ (Acceptance, 286).Footnote ⁴⁸ Its writing arm, now ‘obscured by loam or moss’, is the only trace of the humanity it may have contained (285). Like humanity in the Anthropocene, this monstrous arm is engaged in a becoming-geological that inscribes it into deep, planetary time. Orbiting the Crawler, the biologist observes a ring of half-moons that look like jellyfish, a ring of black stones that have ‘a sponginess that made her think of soft tadpoles’, and a ring of ‘globes of gold’ spinning with ‘ferocious velocity’ (285). Each image blends the organic with the geological, in a composite organism whose scale appears to be simultaneously planetary and cellular.

If the Crawler is a vision of multi-scalar agency shaped by Anthropocene nightmares,Footnote ⁴⁹ the biologist-as-living-mountain is a more peaceful, Gaian figure. But this monstrous body also compresses together organic, geological, and cosmological scales, through eyes that looks like ‘constellations’ and ‘[t]he green-and-white stars of barnacles on its back in the hundreds of miniature craters, of tidal pools from time spent motionless in deep water, time lost inside that enormous brain’ (195). These two figures – the living mountain and the Crawler – are thus two complementary facets of the remapping of agency on a planetary scale. The Crawler as body/cell/planet and the biologist as whale/stars/mountain are tropes that effect a metaphorical cross-mapping between different scale domains. They are both synecdoches for Area X, which Ghost Bird understands progressively thanks to her encounters with them. These are turning-points in the third novel, where Ghost Bird not only understands but responds to Area X. In both scenes, she returns the gaze of the monster and reaches out to touch it, for a moment where she is beholding and beheld: the biologist-mountain is ‘[s]taring up at her with her own eyes’ (196) and through the Crawler she feels ‘Area X peering in at her’ (286). In these encounters, the narrative emphasis on mutual gaze and touch highlights the occurrence of an ethical event. These figures act as catalysts for the environmental response-ability that has built up slowly throughout the trilogy, first through the biologist and then through her clone.

VanderMeer’s scale-bending organisms unravel the human figure but preserve fragments of the human body – the eyes, the hand – as sites that call for ethical response. I read these monstrous organisms as instances of the unravelling body which, as Peter Boxall has theorised, is a recurrent trope of early twenty-first-century fiction. This figure, Boxall suggests, responds to the era of biotechnology and information technology, where the human body is ‘editable and reproducible’ in unprecedented ways: the figure expresses an awareness of ‘the unregulated material presence of the body itself’, and permits encounters with ‘unravelled biological matter’.Footnote ⁵⁰ That observation rings true for the tower as living flesh, the biologist as thinking landscape, and the Crawler as a merging of cellular and planetary scales, which are all sites of defigured and reconfigured biological unity. It is through her encounters with them that Ghost Bird, who is a clone of the biologist, becomes aware of her body as reproducible biological matter. Like Kazuo Ishiguro’s clones in Never Let Me Go, VanderMeer’s monsters are thus postgenomic figures through which humans may negotiate ‘the limits of their proliferating selves’.Footnote ⁵¹ But the scale-troubling bodies imagined by VanderMeer are shaped by Anthropocene guilt. They bring into view, within the human body, the geological scale of a changing planet as well as the microscopic scales of genetic mutation, contamination, and slow environmental violence. Whereas a plant sampled from Area X ironically survives ‘attempts at destruction that included stabbings, careful burnings, deprivation of soil and water, introduction of parasites, general neglect, the emanation of hateful vibes, verbal and physical abuse, and much more’ (Authority, 120), the human characters undergo a kind of reverse contamination through the fragments – a spore, a sliver – that represent the environment.

The trilogy’s multi-scalar poetics are thus shaped by unstable mereological relations, where the part and the whole tend to morph into each other. The sentient landscapes are reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Island of the Fay’, where valleys and mountains are seen as ‘the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole […] whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain’.Footnote ⁵² Watching a woman try to get rid of an ant she can feel crawling on her back, Control wonders: ‘Was he the woman with no clue where the ant was or the ant, unaware it was on the woman?’ (86). This ontological uncertainty characterises the three main narrators – the biologist, Control, and Ghost bird – who can all be viewed as instances of the ‘ecological detective’, a character type that Sara L. Crosby identities in Poe’s stories, which ‘underlines the successful survivor’s special capacity for empathy, careful observation, particularly of the relations between things, and deployment of scientific/esthetic knowledge’.Footnote ⁵³ The biologist takes samples, Control obsesses over a phone and a plant brought back by previous expeditions, and Ghost Bird slowly comes to terms with the fact that she is herself a part of Area X sent out beyond its borders. But whereas the samples reveal no information about the area, Control gradually learns to see the region through the notion of ‘terroir’, a holistic view of environment where ‘no two areas are exactly the same’ (131), and elements are not studied separately so much as ‘all of it considered together’ (132). Like the many other cases of antonomasia in the novel – ‘the biologist’, ‘the surveyor’, and so on – the name ‘Control’ is itself a form of reductive synecdoche, a simplification of the whole human being to one of its characteristics. When he finally leaps into the light at the heart of Area X, Control feels his nickname ‘fall away’ (311), as if the move itself was an escape from reductive antonomasia.

The novel’s onomastics, as well as its portrayal of environment as terroir, resist synecdoche as reductive scientific or linguistic strategy. Instead, the trilogy’s multi-scalar poetics foreground synecdoche as a critical relation, where a part may both represent and resist the whole. Area X is both an image of a Gaian Earth and ‘a long, thick thorn so large it is buried deep in the side of the world’ (Annihilation, 190). In her final encounter with the Crawler, Ghost Bird understands that Area X itself is a synecdochic fragment of a lost, alien organism:

This history confirms the autopoietic functioning of Area X, and its resemblance to a Gaian planet, but complexifies this system by making it a technical instrument with a lost purpose. This suggestion of temporally delayed and distorted agency can be understood through Latour’s definition of technology as ‘congealed labour’,Footnote ⁵⁴ in which many past agents are folded into our actions. As Latour explains, technical mediation folds the past into the present: an object like a sleeping policeman, for instance, stands in for the absent police and engineers that placed it there, so that ‘I live in the midst of technical delegates; I am folded into nonhumans’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Technical delegation, in other words, is another form of synecdoche, but one which connects the present fragment to a past assemblage. Ironically, the nonhuman environment described by VanderMeer, just like the terraformed planet Earth in Winterson’s novel, turns out to be a technical delegate and thus a synecdoche for an extinct civilisation. Through these ironies, the Southern Reach trilogy and The Stone Gods not only redistribute agency over incommensurable physical scales but fold radically different timescales into the temporality of action.

What, then, does Area X figure? It resembles Lovelock’s and Margulis’s definition of Gaia: an autopoietic system that is self-producing and self-maintaining. But instead of a complete system in itself, it is a part of, and an ambivalent sign for, two autopoietic biospheres: the first is extinct, while the second – the Earth – is engaged in a futile struggle against it. That struggle may be a metaphor for the suicidal drive of what Lovelock calls humanity’s ‘war’ against Gaia.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is striking, however, that rather than building a clear allegory – Area X as the ‘revenge of Gaia’ – the trilogy favours the ambiguous poetics of synecdoche, where one part represents several wholes (Area X is part of an alien organism and part of the Earth), and the part may enter into conflict with the whole it represents. This ambiguity gives synecdoche a singular critical potential.

3.4 Critical Synecdoche and Environmental Response-Ability

In designating certain synecdoches as ‘critical’, I have suggested that these individuals or fragments critique the whole that they represent – whether this whole be the human species of the Anthropocene, the Globe of capitalism, or other totalities. I use the word critique here in the sense that Judith Butler, after Michel Foucault, has defined it: as a practice of critical thinking that questions our ways of knowing. Critique, in this sense, reacts to a crisis of knowing:

Winterson’s and VanderMeer’s poetics, I suggest, highlight precisely such ‘tear[s] in the fabric of our epistemological web’ because they react to a time where categories such as the human subject and the natural object are questioned by the biology of symbiosis, Gaia theory, and Anthropocene awareness. This destabilisation is an ontological as well as an epistemological event. Butler argues that, through critical practice, a subject who has emerged ‘in relation to an established order of truth’ will ‘take a point of view on that established order that retrospectively suspends its own ontological ground’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Critical distance thus puts at risk ‘one’s very formation as subject’ because it is a practice where a self forms itself by placing itself in an ontologically insecure position that deforms it as a subject. Winterson’s and VanderMeer’s focalisers resist the power structures that have formed them as subjects – the Central Power of Orbus, the Southern Reach Agency – by questioning the epistemic framework of those authorities: they resist the terraforming syntax that objectifies the planet in The Stone Gods, or the controlling syntax of humans versus environment in the Southern Reach trilogy. Their ontological grounding as subjects is all the more troubled by the fact that these novels question transitivity itself as a syntax for environmental agency. The starkest case of this overlapping epistemological and ontological destabilisation is of course Control, whose very name represents the epistemological web that is tearing.

Synecdoche, I suggest, can act as a critical tool because it allows for difference and distortion within a tropic relation that views a whole process through one of its parts. Area X instils in its human observers a strong sense of pars pro toto relations, where the environment looks out at humans from every organism, and where Area X becomes a replica of the Earth system it is now a part of. But the narrative insistence on the uncanny, leading up to the final revelation that it is also an alien space, introduces a fundamental distortion within these pars pro toto relations, and this warping is where epistemological frameworks can be questioned: in active conflict with the environment it replicates and distorts, Area X is placed in a critical relation to the Earth of the Anthropocene. A mise en abyme of this synecdochic function is provided by the fact that the biologist specialises in ‘transitional’ ecosystems: microcosms that appear at the border between two ecosystems and that therefore represent both ecosystems. She loves observing tidal pools and the visible conflicts and symbioses they contain. This fascination is shared by the lighthouse keeper, who finds refuge among the tidal pools after ‘an enormous tidal wave like a living creature’ hits the coast and Area X begins to form: ‘Some bottom-dwelling fish contemplated him with a kind of bulging, jaded regard […]. If he stared long enough into the comforting oblivion of that microcosm, it washed away everything else, even the shadow of his reflection’ (Acceptance, 231–3). The tidal pool resembles Area X: not only does it constitute a transition between two worlds, and a synecdochic fragment of both, but it also looks back at the human observer in much the same way. The sense of temporary, ‘comforting oblivion’ experienced by the lighthouse keeper signals the ontological destabilisation that the synecdoche produces, dissolving the subject in an epistemological framework that negates it. By placing several human characters in this position, the trilogy experiments with different reactions of the self to this deformation of the subject. Whereas the lighthouse keeper, whose function ties him symbolically to the constraints of Enlightenment thinking, ultimately experiences the arrival of Area X as utmost horror and goes on to haunt the tower as the trace of a human face in the Crawler, the ecosystems biologist survives with a new, symbiotic sense of self.

In The Stone Gods, the tearing epistemological web is that of global capitalism’s faith in endless extraction and escapist terraforming. The novel’s critical synecdoches oppose human individuals to their species, and utopian spaces to a wrecked environment. Winterson thus ironises allegory, for instance by reducing her Gaian cyborg to a severed head – a body part that represents the world to Billie, but that is only one piece of a damaged whole. Although allegory remains present as a trope through which environmental guilt is tackled, Winterson’s ironic synecdoches highlight the rift between this allegorical mode that structures collective modes of Anthropocene awareness and the reality of assemblage agency. Synecdoche, in other words, draws attention to the epistemic contradictions of Anthropocene agency where, as Chakrabarty points out, ‘the mode of being in which humans collectively may act as a geological force is not the mode of being in which humans – individually and collectively – can become conscious of being such a force’.Footnote ⁵⁹ If we formulate Chakrabarty’s insight in Butler’s terms, the subject of Anthropocene awareness cannot correspond to the subject of Anthropocene agency, since the former is a discursive construction based on the magnification of the human into a species-wide subject, whereas the latter is an assemblage of many scales of life and technology. When Winterson’s narrators walk away from the power structures that have formed them as subjects, they begin to form their selves in this ethical-ontological contradiction, namely, they are not the subjects of the actions for which they are nonetheless responsible.

The troubling work of synecdoche thus engages productively with the cognitive challenge of environmental agency. Compared to allegory, synecdoche enables a different – and I would argue less paralysing – relation to this agency, through fragments and partial views. In the Southern Reach trilogy and The Stone Gods, the trajectories followed by the main characters take them away from the trap of totalising images. Although Winterson’s first narrator is fascinated by the images of the pristine blue planet taken from space, the jungle in which her mission lands is a dark, deafening cacophony. In a proleptic scene, when Billie, Spike, and Pink are paddling across a ‘wide, still, blue’ lake, one of the canoes overturns. Billie dives in, losing their paddle in the process, and discovers ‘everywhere, around [them], eyes, ancient underwater eyes. And in the bottom of the lake, a black and boiling eruption’ (87). The view from inside belies the distant impression of blue peacefulness: it implies the loss of control, symbolised here by the paddle, of clarity, and of grammatical position, since the observer finds herself the object of scrutiny. VanderMeer also pictures the redistribution of agency through the multiplication of eyes: the biologist-turned-mountain appears to Ghost Bird to have ‘many, many glowing eyes that were also like flowers or sea anemones spread open’ (195). In that description, the destabilisation of categories such as vegetal/animal/human is enhanced by the fact that the biologist’s eyes are Ghost Bird’s ‘own eyes’ (196), so that the epistemological upheaval is also an ontological weakening of the subject. These encounters force the observer to focus on fragments that represent, but do not resemble, the whole environment. VanderMeer and Winterson both draw on the Levinasian and Derridean tradition that situates the ethical relation in the gaze, but also highlight the difficulty of ethically encountering the environment, by dispersing and multiplying its eyes.

In other words, Winterson’s and VanderMeer’s poetics destabilise the allegorical figures through which we imagine environmental responsibility – such as the planet as a damaged body, or the giant human named by the Anthropocene – by exploring synecdoches as critical sites that enable response-ability. This ethical potential is particularly striking in their use of the footprint trope. In The Stone Gods, the disastrous effects of the mission to Planet Blue are a planetary footprint that later humanity does not recognise as its own, and the irony of humanity’s repeating history produces what Morton calls the ‘strange loop’ of ecological awareness.Footnote ⁶⁰ Beginning with the description of a monstrous clawprint, the novel toys with the footprint trope as a figure of more-than-human agency. When Billie jumps ship, just as the mission is about to leave, they choose to remain behind in the ‘muddied, trampled undergrowth’ (97) and to face the footprint the mission has left on Planet Blue. This undergrowth has been crushed by panicking animals after the asteroid hits Planet Blue:

Ecological impact is figured here as a stampede rather than a footprint, an assemblage of ‘feet, hoofs, claws, paws’ whose size hints at the scale of catastrophe. Winterson mocks a quantitative approach to ecological action by depicting a climatic derangement where safety has ‘nothing to do with size’. This distrust of measurement is echoed by the third narrator, when she relates the inefficiency of twenty-first-century global politics in the face of climate change: ‘[t]here were rows about carbon quotas, carbon capture, carbon trading,’ she notes, ‘as though the carbon footprint was just a matter of dropping a shoe-size’ (157). The Stone Gods thus anticipates critiques of carbon discourse, which emphasise that the focus on certain carbon compounds – such as carbon trading or carbon credits – supports the domination of market-led solutions to climate degradation.Footnote ⁶¹ The novel’s ironic references to footprints undermine quantitative measurement, drawing attention instead to the embodiment of impact that the figure performs.

In his critique of footprint rhetoric, Nathaniel Rivers suggests that current uses of the footprint trope too often suggest an ‘ethics of distance’, whereby environmentalism becomes a question of size instead of a question of the kind of footprint we leave, and environmental awareness ‘is bought at the expense of ontological complexity’.Footnote ⁶² For Rivers, thinking the footprint synecdoche ‘beyond size and measurement’ allows us to think of the environment as more than a passive container for human action.Footnote ⁶³ This shift, from a quantitative to a qualitative footprint, is also a shift from a metric to a synecdoche. Asking how we can better inhabit our footprints, Rivers uses Tim Ingold’s distinction between transport, conceived as movement across the surface of the Earth, and wayfaring, conceived as movement along and within the Earth. This distinction allows him to articulate the trope as not only quantitative impact – the footprint as transport, for which we are accountable – but also qualitative engagement – the footprint as wayfaring, in which we respond to interactions. I find these oppositions particularly relevant for the trajectories followed in The Stone Gods, where each story begins with Billie Crusoe abandoning, or being abandoned by, a mode of transport – the spaceship, the sail ship, the tube – and where each Billie then faces humanity’s responsibility for ecological catastrophe by travelling on foot towards the darkness of a cave or a forest. Winterson’s ironic poetics, in other words, enact both the ‘Terrestrial’ repositioning demanded by Latour and the ‘more intense enactment of footprints’ called for by Rivers.Footnote ⁶⁴

In the Southern Reach trilogy, footprints are conspicuous because Area X is precisely a place where humanity’s ecological footprint has been erased. At the beginning of the first novel, the biologist begins to ‘think like a detective’ (62) after following boot prints and traces of slime – which she also thinks of as footprints – down the tower. These prints lead her to a dead member of her expedition transformed almost beyond recognition by the living environment, ‘her legs […] fused together and half-melted’ (61). But the biologist’s careful investigation of the different prints shows her that the dead human was led to this fate by another human. Footprints here are linked to crime in the classic detective novel paradigm, but the agent of the crime turns out to be both a human and an environment. The footprint thus functions as a synecdoche for both human and environmental agency, and for the entanglement of the two. In the third novel, the trope is foregrounded in a striking passage where Control, taken prisoner by the assistant director who survived alone in Area X for three years, awakens on the landing of the ruined lighthouse, and is faced with the underside of her boot:

This scale-bending image plays with the polysemy of words such as tread (the underside of the boot, but also a footprint) and grip (a quality possessed by the boot, but also the idea of control over a situation). The sole is described as a trodden-down landscape, so that the boot is also the boot print: simultaneously a metonym for human action, a synecdoche for the destructive effects of this action, and a metaphor for the impacted environment. This ‘map’ is radically different from the constant surveying and mapping carried out by the expeditions. Based on an ideal of total measurement, those were cognitive dead ends. By contrast, the tread of the boot is a collection of traces – a ‘smudge’, a ‘smear’, a ‘glitter’ – that act as synecdoches for a complex intertwining of agencies, where the human ‘tread’ is itself covered in the traces of its environment. In Ingold’s terms, the ‘army-issue’ boot is a means only of transport, not of wayfaring. But the disembodied ant, which echoes Control’s earlier imagining of himself as an ‘ant’ in Area X, hints at the ontological destabilisation that is occurring at this point, and the ethical nature of his confrontation with this image is highlighted by the ‘lack of care’ that he reads into it. This reading marks the beginning of a transformation which, at the end of the novel, makes him renounce the identity of the subject named Control.

Critical synecdoche, in these novels, works alongside microcosmic and allegorical poetics to trouble smooth analogies and open up the question of response-ability towards other scales. This makes it a particularly fitting trope for cognitive modelling in the Anthropocene: a trope that connects the meso-scale of human experience to the imperceptible scales of genomes and planetary assemblages, yet acknowledges the rifts between scale domains. Unlike the whole Earth images of Planet Blue or the military maps of Area X, synecdoche offers fragmented, partial close-ups, better adapted to a Terrestrial perception that needs to view the complex agencies of the Critical Zone from within their entanglements.Footnote ⁶⁵ Because it allows tensions to subsist between part and whole, critical synecdoche creates space for ethical positioning, where accepting the redistribution of agency into micro- and macroscopic assemblages does not mean renouncing responsibility for the scale effects of the Anthropocene. In Chapter 4, I continue this reflection on tropes as sites of response-ability by examining the limitations of allegory as a form of ‘storytelling at species scale’.Footnote ⁶⁶