Summary
Part 04, "Immersion," begins with the biologist recalling her sessions with the psychologist during training. The biologist resisted psychoanalysis, which seemed at the time to perturb the psychologist, but in the end she believes that the psychologist admired her for her guardedness and considered it an asset to the expedition. In recalling the sessions, the biologist provides both her given answers and the answers she recited in her head, which clues the reader in to both her presented identity and her hidden interiority.
To the biologist's surprise, the psychologist is still alive and conscious. She's bleeding profusely and her limbs are twisted and mangled. It's clear that she fell out of the tower; what's unclear is whether she jumped. As the biologist approaches, the psychologist screams the word "annihilation" over and over again. When the biologist props her upright, the psychologist seems to be delirious. She is under the impression that she killed the biologist. The biologist attempts to get as much information from the psychologist as possible before her death, which seems to be rapidly approaching. The psychologist admits to sending the anthropologist down the tower prematurely. She says that their mission was compromised as soon as they made their first descent. She admits that the little black boxes that supposedly turn red in the presence of danger are fake and don't actually measure anything; they simply exist to put the explorers' minds at ease. All the psychologist is really willing to reveal, in the end, is that she believes they should never have come to Area X. She calls it "the one fundamental truth" (131-132).
When the psychologist dies, the biologist examines her body and searches her person for possible answers to the questions she refused to answer while she was still alive. The biologist notices a strange porosity in the psychologist's shoulder and arm, and when she cuts away her sleeve she finds her body to be "colonized by a fibrous green-gold fuzziness, which gave off a faint glow" (132-133). She takes samples of the growth. She recognizes that the psychologist must have had more direct contact with whatever material she inhaled that was causing her to have heightened senses. She finds the psychologist's notebook, a handgun, and a letter addressed to some named person; the biologist wonders if it's a child or a lover, but quickly balls it up and throws it out toward the sea. When she turns out the psychologist's pockets, she finds a slip of paper containing the hypnotic phrases that "induce paralysis," "induce acceptance," and "compel obedience" (135). She sees that the word "Annihilation" is the cue to induce suicide.
The biologist recalls her husband's recurring nightmare he had as a child that involved a basement and its history of murder. The nightmares were debilitating, and he saw a counselor for many years. Then, in college, he saw a horror film that depicted the exact details of his nightmare. He realized that he probably saw the movie as a child and the images imprinted on his memory. After he saw the movie and realized that the terror he experienced was an illusion, he felt totally free.
She then reflects on the gradual process by which her husband became increasingly committed to the eleventh expedition. She realizes now that he was likely being hypnotized before he was even accepted by the Southern Reach as an explorer. Part of her still blames him for accepting the mission, but another part of her realizes that there's really nowhere else on earth she would rather be that would satisfy her curiosity and passion for biology more than Area X, even if it's the last thing she ever does.
As she makes her way back to base camp from the lighthouse, night falls quickly. The biologist must weigh the danger of traveling through Area X at night against the instinctive danger she feels towards the lighthouse, and decides that she has no desire to sleep there overnight. As she walks through the reeds and marsh, she hears the high keening moan of whatever unknown creature she and the other explorers had grown accustomed to hearing every night at sundown. She's never been this close to the mysterious creature. She senses it nearby and tracks the trail of molten skin it seems to leave behind. She spots what appears to be a human face on the ground, or the skin of a human face molted off of some mutant form. She compares it to the abandoned shell of a horseshoe crab.
When she turns a corner past some flattened reeds, she feels the creature is trying to outflank her. Before she knows it, it's right alongside her. The lightness in her body seems to propel her forward, and she runs faster than she thought she was capable of running. For a moment, it seems like she doesn't stand a chance of making it out of the encounter alive, but all of the sudden, the creature retreats. The biologist keeps running without looking back.
Once she puts an adequate distance between herself and the creature, she climbs high up into a tree and sleeps in a sturdy bend of its branches. After some time, she remembers why she recognized the features of the molten face she saw back in the reeds: it belonged to the psychologist from the eleventh expedition, the psychologist who accompanied her husband into Area X. She remembers his face from the taped interviews they watched during training. She writes, "Death, as I was beginning to understand it, was not the same thing here as back across the border" (144).
The next morning, the biologist approaches the base camp with ease. She notices that the brightness she feels within her is now manifesting through her skin, which is phosphorescent. When she's about a mile from base, a shot rings out and catches her in the shoulder. A second shot connects with her side. She sees the surveyor's scope in the brush and takes cover. The surveyor demands to know what happened to the psychologist, and the biologist tells her she's dead and that she jumped off the lighthouse. The biologist promises, from cover, that she isn't the surveyor's enemy and pleads with her to simply turn around and await extraction. The surveyor continues to stalk the biologist, but the biologist flanks her and shoots her in the head.
Confirming the surveyor's death, the biologist then floats her body into a marsh and lets it sink down. The biologist offers a few words for the surveyor as some gesture of goodwill and respect for the dead. Shortly after, the holes in her body start beaming with an increasingly intense brightness from within her. The brightness knocks her on her back and paralyzes her. She cannot move, and she's aware that some distant part of her is experiencing pain, but the foreign bodies in her body are somehow shielding her from that pain.
The biologist explains some of the symptoms of the brightness that she previously left unsaid. She experienced a low-grade fever, sinus inflammation, and a light cough. The brightness has been accompanied by bursts in energy and periods of lethargy. She realizes, after being shot, that the shock of that trauma somehow allowed her body to equilibrate, and when she woke from her thrashing fit, she felt strangely well. When she returns to base camp, she finds it destroyed. The surveyor has slashed the tents, dismantled the weapons, poured out the drinking water, and disposed of the food. Luckily, the biologist made her own secret store of water and food before they left camp the first time. She also knows that, if need be, there were supplies back at the lighthouse.
Analysis
"Immersion" begins with a closer look at the psychoanalysis that took place during training at the Southern Reach facility. The biologist recalls her strained dialogues with the psychologist, but the way she renders the recollections give the reader two impressions: first, the impression of the actual contents of the sessions between the psychologist and the biologist, and second, the biologist's internal monologue in response to the psychologist's questions. The following excerpt demonstrates the pattern:
“Tell me about your parents. What are they like?” she would ask, a classic opening gambit.
“Normal,” I replied, trying to smile while thinking distant, impractical, irrelevant, moody, useless. (121)
The scene continues, portraying the biologist's actual, glib, withholding answers in dialogue and following them up with her expansive, personal, and revealing responses to the questions in italics. There is some irony to this dichotomy in the idea that the biologist used to insist to her husband that when she was being laconic, it was simply her personality, and that there wasn't some more tender part of herself hiding under the surface.
The situational irony continues when the biologist discovers the psychologist dying at the base of the lighthouse. The roles are reversed, and the biologist takes to questioning the psychologist, without success. The psychologist's own caginess mirrors the biologist's in the earlier interview, and when the biologist tells her that she's impervious to hypnosis, the psychologist seems, for the first time, genuinely at a loss for words. When she finally answers, the biologist senses "an odd sense of pride in her voice" (125). Even in their reversed roles of questioner and questionee, the psychologist maintains control of the narrative, offering snide critiques of the biologist's questions. The biologist writes, "I think it amused the psychologist, even dying, for me to so desperately need answers from her" (129). Over the course of their conversation, the psychologist reveals more deceit from the Southern Reach. For example, the biologist demands to know what the black boxes on their toolbelts measure, and the psychologist admits that they don't measure anything—they're simply a ruse, a placebo to put the explorers' minds at ease.
Metaphorical language becomes more prominent as the biologist's grip on the "normal" loosens and she becomes more integrated into the landscape and DNA of Area X. The lighthouse no longer retains its "normal" metaphorical associations that lighthouses carry outside Area X; in Area X, the lighthouse is "no longer really a lighthouse but instead a kind of reliquary" (138). Reliquaries generally contain the body part of a deceased saint; they are both art objects and holy objects and are cherished as containers of organic material that is directly linked to God. The lighthouse may not contain the bodies of all past explorers, but it does contain their "flimsy gravestones" (110) in the form of their notebooks. These explorers who died in Area X are also known to be absorbed by Area X in death, which the biologist admits "is not the same thing here as back across the border" (144). The explorers live on in the landscape of Area X as saints are thought by Christians to live on through God. Through this reliquary metaphor, VanderMeer paints Area X as a sacred realm in the world.
As the biologist is increasingly affected by the spores, her tendency to personify the environment also increases, perhaps because she, a person, is being integrated into the environment, and thus her understanding of personhood and nature becomes intertwined. As she hikes back to base away from the shore, she writes "The ever-more distant sound of waves was like eavesdropping on a sinister, whispering conversation" (139). When she finds the molted face of the eleventh expedition's psychologist, she describes it as "a kind of tan mask made of skin, half-transparent, resembling in its way the discarded shell of a horseshoe crab" (140).
Near the end of the chapter, the biologist expresses her amusement at a memory of her washing spaghetti off of dishes the night her husband returned home from Area X. She remembers "wondering with a kind of bewilderment how such a mundane act could coexist with the mystery of his reappearance" (154). This thought mimics an observation she made earlier in the book after emerging from the tower into a calm, sunny day. She says, "How what we had seen below could coexist with the mundane was baffling" (68). The juxtaposition of the mundane with the sublime underscores the insidious and subtle ways which Area X creeps into the world and lives of those who attempt to understand it.
