Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between I: The Weird Tale – Rafe McGregor

The first of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by framing first the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the weird tale.

 

Wyrd, Weyrd, Weird

‘Weyrd’ came to Middle English in the fifteenth century from the Old Norse urðr via the Anglo-Saxon wurd and Old English ‘wyrd’. Its meaning in the ancient languages was twofold, denoting both personal destiny and the personification of personal destiny in the three deities that tended Yggdrasil (the Norse tree of life), who were known as the Norns. A thinly-disguised version of the Norns appears in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (first performed in 1606), where they are called the ‘weyrd’ or ‘weyward’ sisters, i.e. witches (like his contemporaries, Shakespeare had little interest in consistent spelling, including the writing of his own name). The Oxford English Dictionary identifies four distinct but related meanings of ‘weird’ in Modern English:

1.     Having or claiming to have the power to control the fate or the destiny of human beings.

2.     Suggestive of unearthly character or strangeness that is unaccountable or uncomfortable.

3.     Having a strange or unusual appearance.

4.     Out of the ordinary, odd, fantastic.

We can summarise these by conceiving of ‘the weird’ as supernatural rather than natural and uncommon rather than common, but this isn’t particularly helpful when it comes to identifying a category or genre of fiction. Almost all speculative fiction, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune series (2021, 2024), could be described as supernatural and/or uncommon.

A popular route out of this impasse is to identify the weird with the uncanny. Writing for The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman compares King, Lovecraft, and Kafka: ‘Still, when you’re in the presence of the genuine, uncanny article, you know. Stephen King is tremendously imaginative, but H.P. Lovecraft is weird; Kafka is probably the ultimate weird writer.’ The concept of the uncanny as it is commonly used today, particularly with respect to literary criticism, is a translation of Sigmund Freud’s Das Unheimliche, which was introduced in an essay published in 1919. Directly translated, ‘unheimlich’ means ‘not from the home’ and some critics prefer to use the more direct ‘unhomely’. In Freud’s essay, the uncanny is the return of the repressed and he explains it by means of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, ‘The Sandman’ (1817), and Otto Rank’s The Double (published in 1925, but written in 1914), a psychoanalytic exploration of the doppelgänger. The core of Freud’s conception of the unhomely is that something can be simultaneously familiar and alien. In his authoritative The Uncanny (2003), Nicholas Royle identifies Martin Heidegger as providing the most intense philosophical exploration of the concept. The very premise of Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), is that what we take to be ordinary is in fact extra-ordinary and uncanny. Dasein (which can be translated as ‘being-here’ or, to use less abstruse terminology, ‘agency’ or ‘selfhood’) is fundamentally ‘not-at-home’ in the world and Dasein itself is thus uncanny, in consequence of which we experience Angst (anxiety). Like China Miéville and Mark Fisher, however, I don’t think that the uncanny gives us the answer to what weird fiction is.

Romanticism to Modernism

Unlike Miéville, I do think that the origins of weird fiction can be found in Gothic Romanticism. In medieval art, Gothic style was distinguished from Classical style by its abandonment of restraint and subtlety, deploying caricature and exaggeration to evoke strong emotions and created with the intention of expressing the artist’s emotion rather than representing the reality in which the artist lived. As an artistic movement, the Gothic survived the transition from the medieval to the modern in the form of architecture, specifically the Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic that became popular in the seventeenth century. The Gothic focus on emotion, expression, and evocation meant that interest was revived once again with the development of Romanticism a century later. The Romantic movement elevated the significance of emotion, expression, and individualism and prioritised the natural over the industrial and the medieval over the modern. Unsurprisingly, the Romantic movement saw the development of the English novel from an experimental to an established art form and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is regarded as the first work of Gothic fiction. The genre reached its apotheosis with Shelley’s Frankenstein which, in turn, influenced two distinct sets of nineteenth century precursors to weird fiction, one on each side of the Atlantic. I should mention at this point that this series will focus exclusively on the Anglophone weird, in consequence of the combination of my own ignominious monolingualism, the consolidation of the genre in America’s pulp magazines in the first half of the twentieth century, and the continued dominance of English as the preferred language of its authors. This restriction means that I exclude at least one exemplary author of weird fiction, Franz Kafka (1883-1924). As one of the leading lights of Modernist literature, Kafka is rarely linked to pulp, popular, or genre fiction, but I agree completely with Rothman’s characterisation.

In the US, the crucial link between Gothic Romanticism and weird fiction is, of course, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849, pictured). Poe was one of the first masters of the short story and I regard his ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (published in Graham’s Magazine in 1841) as the origin of both crime fiction and weird fiction. Poe was succeeded by Ambrose Bierce (1842-c.1914), Madeline Yale Wynne (1847-1918), and Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933). The tradition in the UK (actually Ireland, which was part of the UK at the time) emerged with the work of Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), who retains a reputation as one of the greatest ghost story writers in English. Le Fanu was succeeded by Violet Paget (1854-1933, writing under the penname Vernon Lee, pictured), Conan Doyle (1859-1930), and M.R. James (1862-1936). Doyle is often underrated as a writer of horror and I have attempted to redress this imbalance in The Conan Doyle Weirdbook (2012). Ramsay Campbell claims that H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) united and advanced the traditions in which Poe and Le Fanu were working and Lovecraft acknowledged his debt to both traditions in his literary criticism. Campbell regards Lovecraft’s Mythos (which he prefers to call the Lovecraft rather than Cthulhu Mythos) as evidence of his lifelong attempt to perfect the weird tale, which involved an experimentation with prose comparable to his more lauded contemporaries in Modernist literature, such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Kafka. If not a part of Modernism, the weird tale is, at the very least, an epiphenomenon of it.

Weird Worldviews

I still haven’t answered the question of what weird fiction is or what it was Lovecraft spent his life trying to perfect. There was little critical or academic interest in the weird until the turn of the century and that interest is largely the result of the efforts of literary critic S.T. Joshi, who spent the last decade of the twentieth century pioneering the field of weird fiction criticism. In 1990, he published The Weird Tale, which was the first of his many monographs on the genre and remains the most authoritative critical study published to date. Joshi identifies the weird tale as a retrospective category of speculative fiction that was published from 1880 to 1940 and is essentially rather than superficially philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview. Although alternative definitions of the weird in terms of the sublime, the uncanny, and the disgusting have been proposed, Joshi’s remains the most compelling. Lovecraft was a prolific – perhaps even compulsive – letter writer and defined his own oeuvre as cosmic horror, in which ‘common human laws and interests are emotions that have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large’. What distinguishes Lovecraft from his contemporaries, such as Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951, pictured) and Edward Plunkett (1878-1957, writing under his aristocratic title Lord Dunsany), is thus the absence of the supernatural. Lovecraft’s monsters are not werewolves, vampires, or ghosts, but aliens (although humanity is unable to distinguish the two). In his out-of-print biography of Lovecraft, L. Spraque de Camp referred to the worldview on which Joshi places so much emphasis as ‘futilitarianism’. Lovecraft denied that he was a pessimist in another of his letters: ‘I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist – that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process.’

With the exception of James, Joshi argues that each of the six exemplars of the weird tale – Bierce, James, Arthur Machen (1863-1947), Blackwood, Plunkett, and Lovecraft – had their own worldview, which was explored, expressed, and experimented with in their weird tales. I have already suggested that Bierce and James are more accurately considered as precursors to the weird and I think Joshi errs in omitting William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) from his list. My adjustment thus presents the canonical weird tale as being the work of: Machen, Plunkett, Blackwood, Hodgson, and Lovecraft. Although the prototypical weird tale and the genre of weird fiction more generally are almost always associated with Lovecraft above all others, the best weird tale itself is widely acknowledged to be Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’, which was first published in his collection of short stories, The Listener and Other Stories (1907, Alfred A. Knopf). I came to Lovecraft much later than most – in my thirties – and have read his work in three cycles in the last two decades. In the first, I was amazed, enthralled, and even shocked by his singularity, innovativeness, and complexity. My second reading was much more critical, identifying flaws in both his form (structure and dialogue) and content (pathological racism and casual sexism) and wondering how and why he remains so popular. More recently, I’ve come to see him as a genius for all his moral and artistic flaws, a literary equivalent of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: two awkward, unhappy, and rather unpleasant men whose talent was unrecognised while they were alive, but whose posthumous influence is too great to calculate with any accuracy.

 

Recommended Reading

Fiction

Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Graham’ s Magazine (1848).

Algernon Blackwood, The Willows, The Listener and Other Stories (1907).

H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu, Weird Tales (1928).

Nonfiction

S.T. Joshi, The Weird Tale, Hippocampus Press (1990).

Kate Marshall, Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century, The University of Chicago Press (2023).

Michael Dirda, Introduction, Weird Tales, The Folio Society (2024).