it's just that. it's so fucking important that the linguist bails on the expedition before the novel. the written word fails in area x. it becomes one of the most chilling modes of cosmic incomprehensibility in area x. the biologist's written account is a self-admitted failure. she is nameless. where lies the strangling fruit is all the more terrifying for the fact that it is in a recognizable language with an inscrutable meaning. the journals are ROTTING in the lighthouse, ink running and turning into decaying organic matter along with everything else. no one is named. the novel begins with a pointless semantic debate that everyone is fiercely invested in regarding the tower/tunnel nomenclature. no one has a name. they are instrumentalized to their professions. when she encounters the crawler, the biologist immediately compares it to an encounter with the "destroyer of worlds," a "more apt" name for the starfish than its scientific nomenclature.
"what an inadequate name i had chosen for it—the crawler."
this novel is just as (if not more) concerned with how area x heralds the failure of language, not just the failure of scientific inquiry
