Two Book Tuesday: On Jeff Vandermeer and Ignatius Donnelly

As I dig deeper and more broadly into the past and future of pseudoarchaeology, I’ve been really enjoying following various threads that contribute that inform the pseudoarchaeological project. One particular thread that I’m finding particularly fruitful is the relationship between pseudoarchaeology and science and speculative fiction.

My buddy Dimitri Nakassis let me know about Benjamin Robertson’s None of This Is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff  (2018). Robertson’s book explores Jeff VanderMeer’s “weird fiction” which explores the murky border between the natural and the human (or the culture). For Robertson (and indeed VanderMeer) the relationship between humanity and the material and nature world is a concern common to the humanities (and social sciences) but also central to the emerging notion the Anthropocene. For Robertson’s (and summarizing a complicated and thoughtful analysis) this understanding pervades VanderMeer’s interest in post-human landscapes especially in his Southern Reach novels, his earlier Veniss short stories and novels, and his latest works on Borne. VanderMeer’s interest in materiality in the near future reflects his archaeological sensibility, on the one hand, but also gives him a way to address the presence of multiple and sometimes even conflicting temporalities.

While this might seem pretty remote from my interest in pseudoarchaeology, Robertson’s interest in VanderMeer’s attention to materiality and the production of weird hybrid creatures — and more importantly — weird hybrid forms of time and experience represents a way to conflate present and future ways in which humans contend with a world that is becoming less and less familiar. This method of using defamiliarized human experiences to problematize the Anthropocene demonstrates the viability of pseudoarchaeology to do the same thing. Indeed, the tendency of pseudoarchaeologcial thinkers to approach materiality and temporality in inconsistent, fluid, and hybrid ways works to confront cartesian space, narrativized expressions of time, and the conceits of scientific knowledge making.

Robertson’s book demonstrates the important of VanderMeer (and other weird fiction authors) in creating new spaces to understand the confront the looming (and often very present) realities of the Anthropocene. In many ways, these “weird” authors whose work are populated with incomplete and shifting narratives, temporal disjunctions, and hybrid materiality draw upon the same garbled science and reasoning at the core of pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology. Rather than seeing these aspects of their work as a liability in need to be explained or somehow reconciled with an easy-to-understand reality, weird fiction writers like VanderMeer offer these positions as provocations much in the same way that pseudoarchaeology destabilizes the conventions of archaeological thinking.

I also enjoyed Zachary Michael Jack’s The Strange Genius of Ignatius Donnelly: The Populist Who Debunked Shakespeare and Found Atlantis (2024). Most pseudoarchaeologists look back to Donnelly as a kind of founder of modern pseudoarchaeology. In many ways his two great works of pseudoarchaeological thought – Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) and Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883) remain touchstones in our appreciation of pseudoarchaeological thinking in the late 19th century. That Donnelly’s popular (and populist!) works emerged alongside the formulation of archaeology as a discipline (the AIA was founded in 1879 and Donnelly was effectively a contemporary of Schliemann) gave them further significance as counterpoints to the development of rigorous practice in archaeology. All but the most casual reader of Donnelly’s work understood that these books relied on a convenient conversation between the speculative and the empirical.

It is unsurprising then that Donnelly also tried his hand at speculative fiction, publishing three novels. The first of these Caesar’s Column (1890) was a work of speculative science fiction set in the late 20th century. While I’ve not read it (and it is on my list!), Jack notes that it traces class conflict in the 1880s to its bloody conclusion in the 1980s where violence and warfare engulfs New York City. In short, Donnelly, through writing a century earlier than VanderMeer, provides the link between speculative fiction and pseudoarchaeology that remains tacit in the work of other authors. By locating the present amid new narrative trajectories, Donnelly challenged the dominant progressive argument that things were getting better by complicating our relationship with scientific knowledge and the hierarchies that it produced. In this sense, Donnelly’s pseudoarchaeological ruminations and speculative fiction reflect his populist politics and his deep skepticism toward institutions and institutional knowledge.  

Donnelly also matters to contemporary pseudoarchaeology because his commitments to late 19th century populist politics means deeply held anti-racist beliefs (at least by 19th century standards). While this might seem unnecessarily polemical, one of the tired arguments often brought up to challenge pseudoarchaeological thinking is its association with Nazism (or other far right or far left ideologies) in the past and its use to support racist positions in the present. One can accuse Ignatius Donnelly of many things, but racism is not among them. Not only did he advocate for Freedmen’s Bureau in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but also continued to advocate for Black voting rights throughout the 19th century. Moreover his populist politics sought to establish common ground between farm and labor movements in the late 19th century and protect workers from the growing reach of corporate greed during the Gilded Age.

In other words, if we’re looking for a heroic pseudoarchaeologist to claim as a founder of the discipline — at least in an American context — we could do worse than Ignatius Donnelly.