The fourth 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 first exploring the
limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the
alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the world-without-us.
Search and Solve
In part III, I defined occult detective fiction as subgenre of weird fiction and suggested that the easiest way to understand it was as stories that place a detective character in a supernatural setting. The detective can be identical to a crime fiction detective, such as Detective John Hobbes (played by Denzel Washington) in Gregory Hoblit’s Fallen, or a crime fiction detective with esoteric knowledge, heightened sensitivity to the supernatural, or both, such as Sarah Monette’s (b.1974 and also writes under the penname Katherine Addison, pictured) Kyle Murchison Booth. The detective may have some supernatural powers himself, such as Mike Carey’s Felix Castor, or be a supernatural being, such as Cassandra Khaw’s John Persons. The setting can similarly be almost – but never actually – identical to the real world, as in Mark Valentine and John Howard’s Connoisseur, or one in which the illusion of the everyday conceals a supernatural reality, as in ABC and Showtime’s Twin Peaks (1990-2017). Alternatively, the setting can be one in which the supernatural is a ubiquitous to the real world, as in David Tallerman’s Detective Fièvre, or a different world entirely, itself a speculative fiction, as in Simon Kurt Unsworth’s Hell in his Thomas Fool series. The combination of a more or less realistic detective with a less or more supernatural setting provides the subgenre with its great variety, from Kat Richardson’s Greywalker (2006-2022) to the Millers’ Philosopher Rex (2010) to Fox’s Sleepy Hollow (2013-2017) to Brian Taylor’s Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024). Regardless of the variations in detective protagonist and occult world employed by authors, studios, and directors, occult detective stories usually follow the plot structure associated with detective fiction, which involves that protagonist either searching for a murderer or searching for a missing person (one of the reasons Monette’s Kyle Murchison Booth stories are so striking is that she rarely deploys either).
In explaining the difficulty of creating compelling occult detective fiction in part III, I noted that detective fiction stages the tension between the sequence of events that underpin the narrative and the story that we read or watch. Cultural critic Fredric Jameson (b.1934) takes this tension further, describing the structure of detective stories in terms of two complementary formal devices: the first, which he refers to as temporal or objective, is the solution to the murder or disappearance; the second, which he refers to as spatial or subjective, is the search itself. For Jameson, the search is more significant than the solution and is the focal point for authors because they need to delay the solution as long as plausibly possible (otherwise all murder mysteries would be short stories or television episodes). In combining sequence of events and story, solution and search, the creators of occult detective fiction have a little more flexibility than their crime fiction counterparts and the protagonist-driven-plot can take one of three forms. Detectives are standardly employed to investigate someone else, which is also true of occult detectives. In Paul Crilley’s Poison City (2016), for example, Lieutenant Gideon Tau of the South African Police Service’s Delphic Division is called to investigate the murder of a ramanga, a low-level vampire. The first variation is two detectives investigating one another, which is not necessarily restricted to the work of the occult detective, but easier to achieve with an occult element. In the first season of Amazon Prime Video’s Carnival Row (2019), Inspector Rycroft Philostrate (played by Orlando Bloom) and Piety Breakspear (played by Indira Varma), the Chancellor’s wife, investigate a murder and missing person’s case respectively. Unbeknown to one another, Breakspear is the murderer Philostrate is seeking and Philostrate the missing person Breakspear is seeking (‘missing’ because of his identity as the Chancellor’s natural son). The second variation is the detective investigating herself, a paradox which is almost impossible to represent without an occult element. Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987) is a rare and rich success: private investigator Harry Angel (played by Mickey Rourke) is hired to find a missing person, only to discover that he himself is that person (though the plot is considerably more complex, the starting point is that Angel has amnesia following a war injury).
Horror of Philosophy
If the occult detective story stages a series of tensions – rationality and extra rationality, sequence and story, solution and search – but is also, in virtue of being first and foremost a weird tale, essentially rather than accidentally philosophical, the obvious question is the purpose to which all of these carefully curated tensions are put. My definition of weird fiction in part II and, by extension, of occult detective fiction in part III, was that it typically foregrounds the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. Occult detective fiction explores this difference in its search and grapples with what philosopher Eugene Thacker (year of birth unavailable, but appointed to his first academic position in 2000, pictured) calls the world-without-us in the Horror of Philosophy, a trilogy of short nonfiction. His overarching aim is to first introduce the concept of the world-without-us and then demonstrate that supernatural horror is better equipped to explore that concept than traditional philosophy. As such, In the Dust of This Planet (2011) is primarily focused on conceptualising the world-without-us, which is an articulation of human limitations and contrasted with two related concepts, the world-for-us and the world-in-itself. Starry Speculative Corpse (2014) focuses on reading works of philosophy as if they were horror fiction, which reveals philosophy as a self-defeating activity, undermining its own foundations and paralysing its own thinking. Tentacles Longer Than Night (2015) reverses direction, focusing on reading horror fiction as if it was philosophy. Thacker refines his concern with supernatural horror to the cosmic horror that H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937, pictured) popularised, analysing his apparent futilitarianism to identify the indifferentism at the core of his weird tales. Indifferentism provides the best possible approximation and appropriation of the world-without-us and horror thus succeeds where philosophy fails.
The best way to approach the world-without-us, which will also be of use in explaining Jacques Lacan’s metapsychology in part VI, is to start with philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) transcendental idealism. Kant differentiates between appearances on the one hand and things in themselves on the other. Appearances constitute subjective reality (the reality of the perceiver) and things in themselves objective reality. Transcendental idealism is an epistemological position maintaining that humans only ever gain access to the phenomenal world of appearances (the world of human experience) and that the noumenal world (the world as it is) remains necessarily inaccessible. What is important to recognise is that Kant’s epistemology is neither pessimistic nor nihilistic. The technological advances made by humanity evince a significant overlap between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds (much like that mentioned in part II), but no scientist (or priest or artist) can make a claim to truth beyond the phenomenal. Thacker begins with the world-for-us, abbreviated to World, which is ‘the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also separate from the human.’ When the World ‘resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us’, we conceive of it as the world-in-itself or Earth and the parallels between World and phenomena and Earth and noumena are obvious. Like noumena, Earth is a paradoxical concept – because as soon as we conceptualise it, we transform it into the world-for-us.
World, Earth, and Planet
Thacker’s third and most significant concept is the world-without-us, or Planet, an attempt to articulate human limitations while avoiding the
paradox of trying to comprehend the Earth from a human perspective (and thus
transforming it into World). He describes it as ‘the subtraction of the human
from the world.’ The Planet and the Earth are both inaccessible to humanity,
but where the Earth coexists with the World, the Planet does not. Thacker’s
idea is that the Planet is a way of conceiving of the Earth without collapsing
it into the World. What Thacker is not doing is extending Kant’s epistemology
from two parts to three, from phenomena and noumena to World, Earth, and Planet.
He is, rather, replacing the original dichotomy with a novel one, World and
Planet. The Planet is a negative concept – the subtraction of the human – and
will remain after the human, although it has also preceded and been
contemporaneous to and with the human. In the Anthropocene, the age of humanity,
the Planet is a more useful concept than noumena and Thacker describes his
taxonomy as conceptualising humanity’s home in an era where global climate
change has raised the possibility of our extinction. The overarching thesis of his
trilogy is that horror fiction (and weird fiction in particular) provides the
best exploration of the world-without-us (or at least a much better one than
philosophy does).
Drawing on the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976, mentioned in part I in connection with the unhomely), Jameson regards the tension between the solution and the search in detective fiction as staging, enacting, or dramatizing the rift between World and Earth (Thacker’s terminology is a development of Heidegger’s). I think a good way of understanding the philosophical element of occult detective fiction is as staging, enacting, or dramatizing of the rift between World and Planet. In one sense this is problematic because Thacker’s whole effort in replacing noumena with Planet is directed at articulating the fact that the latter cannot co-exist with the World and can never be apprehended or appropriated by humanity – whether by science, religion, philosophy, or art. On the other hand, approaching occult detective fiction in this way draws attention to its own limits, to the essential incompatibility of the detective as the instrument of reason and the supernatural as defiant of reason. The World does not, in Heidegger’s terms, ground itself on the Planet nor does the Planet jut through the World. Planet is a thingness of things (noumena) that resists assimilation, remains opaque, and can only be grasped as an absence of World. As opposed to the relation between World and Earth, the absence of a relation between World and Planet means that the glimpse of irreconcilability is a glimpse of nothingness, subtraction, and absence. It is this glimpse – of what is essentially rather than accidentally unknown – that fuels a fear more compelling than frightening objects, as Lovecraft was well aware, opening his tour de force, Supernatural Horror in Literature (first published in The Recluse in 1927) with: ‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’
Recommended Reading & Viewing
Fiction
Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom, Tor.com (2016).
Carnival Row, Season 1, Amazon Prime Video (2019).
Angel Heart, directed by Alan Parker, Tri-Star Pictures (1987).
Nonfiction
Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of this Planet, Zer0 Books (2011).
Rafe McGregor, The Complex Art of Murder, Journal of Aesthetic
Education (2022).
Robert H. Waugh, Lovecraft’s Rats and Doyle’s Hound: A Study in Reason
and Madness, Lovecraft Annual 7 (2013).
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