The sixth 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 register of the Real.
Hearts of Darkness
Notwithstanding very fine examples by China Miéville, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and M. John Harrison, the most critically and commercially acclaimed novel in what is usually called the new weird and I am calling the ecological weird is almost certainly Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), which is the first of his Southern Reach Trilogy (which will be a quartet later this month) and was successfully adapted to a feature film of the same name by Alex Garland in 2018 (poster pictured). I do not intend to summarise or review either Annihilation or the Trilogy here, because excellent reviews and review essays have already been published in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Textual Practice, and elsewhere. Instead, I want to sketch a literary (and cinematic) lineage for Annihilation in order to shed light on the definition of ecological weird fiction with which I closed part V. The ecological weird, like occult detective fiction, shares the primary features of weird fiction by exploring the limitations of language, the inaccessibility of the world, and the alienation within ourselves. The last of these is particularly important for and to the ecological weird (to the extent that it does or does not constitute a subgenre or subcategory of the weird) and is a development of the inaccessibility of the world (which I explained in terms of the world-without-us in part IV). In ecological (and other) weird fiction, we not only encounter the alien, but recognise it within ourselves and either resist or accept it (it is no coincidence that the third part of the Southern Reach is titled Acceptance).
I have, in consequence, represented what I take to be the lineage from which Annihilation emerged in a schematic (pictured). The link to J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966) and, by extension, to ‘The Illuminated Man’ (published in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1964), H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Color Out of Space’ (published in Weird Tales in 1927), and Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’ (published in his collection, The Listener and Other Stories, in 1907) is uncontroversial. The Crystal World is a revision and expansion of ‘The Illuminated Man’ and Ballard appears to have deployed formal (and substantive) elements of Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece, Heart of Darkness (1899), in the course of adapting his own work. There are two points to note about this lineage. First, the inclusion of ‘The Willows’, which is – as I noted in part I – widely acknowledged as the single best weird tale ever written, demonstrates that the themes explored by the ecological weird are not new to the genre, merely developed in a different format (typically the novel rather than the short story). Second, Heart of Darkness draws attention to the crux of the ecological weird: it is not only about the (encounter with the) alien and (our) alienation, but self-alienation. Though criticised for its use of language and adoption of attitudes that are now, with complete justification, regarded as offensive, the novella provides a critique of colonialism so robust that it would keep plenty of social media trolls busy for a long time (assuming they had the intelligence and patience to read it). Conrad’s insight is that colonialism is not only bad for the colonised, who suffer what we would now call genocide, but also for colonisers, for whom the remoteness and expansiveness of the colonies facilitates the flourishing of all that is vicious within them. Despite VanderMeer’s repeated and vehement denials that Andrei Tarkovsky’s feature film, Сталкер (1979, translated as Stalker), had any influence on Annihilation, I made a tenuous link in my sketch on the basis of both narratives being concerned not only with a place that is utterly alien to humanity, but with the effects of that place on the minds of the people who enter it. The latter is essential to the ecological weird, the recognition of the alien within ourselves to which we respond with either resistance or acceptance.
The Weird Within
Psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan (1901-1981, pictured) is an
even more controversial figure than Jacques Derrida (whom I discussed in part
II) because he is regarded by many as a cynical (rather than sincere) charlatan
and because there remains no consensus on the value of the vast body of work he
produced over a career of five decades. In contrast to Derrida (and Eugene
Thacker, discussed in part IV), I make no pretence to understanding Lacan’s
overall project or even his individual publications and seminars, but I do
think that what is known as his register theory is useful for grasping
the self-alienation typically explored by and in ecological weird fiction. Register
theory is an account of the modes of human existence and, hence, an ontology (a
study of what exists, the way in which existing things exist, and how best to
classify and codify existing things). As an ontology, register theory
identifies three distinct but intervolved modes of human experience or orders:
reality that can be perceived, reality that is socially constructed by
language, and reality that remains inaccessible. The Imaginary refers to
the world that human beings understand perceptively and non-reflectively and to
the way in which human beings understand both that world and themselves as
infants, i.e. before they develop the capacity for language. The Imaginary is therefore
an innocent and naïve mode of human experience in which human beings are
reduced to their perceptual capacities.
The Symbolic refers to the socially constructed world, which human beings access by means of language. The rules of the Symbolic order are revealed by the investigation of the way in which both language and social relations function and Lacan draws on the classic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, whom I introduced in my discussion of Derrida in part II, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist. The Symbolic cannot be grasped in its entirety, with the result that human beings remain unaware of structures, contexts, and exchanges which have a profound influence on their lives. The Real refers to the ineffable world, which is detectable by human beings indirectly through the unconscious. The ineffable transcends expression and exceeds language, making it very difficult to discuss and impossible to apprehend. The Real can nonetheless be conceived as an objective reality that is inaccessible to subjective and intersubjective perception and cognition, a kind of Kantian noumenon or thing-in-itself (see part IV). The primary means of conceiving the Real is the unconscious, which is why register theory is a significant component in Lacan’s metapsychology. What makes the three orders or registers useful for understanding the ecological weird is that they are not only a taxonomy of the types of thing that exist but also structure the psyche, i.e. human subjectivity. The structure of subjectivity thus consists of all three of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real and the Real is the alien – or weird – within, the part of ourselves that is impossible to apprehend and can only be conceived partially and indirectly.
Future Weird
Weird fiction is thriving. Perhaps not quite as much as in its heyday, almost exactly a century ago, but probably in a healthier condition given that it is no longer tied to and dependent on a single format (the short story) or the success of a particular outlet (Weird Tales). I want to close this series with a couple of observations that draw on my short-lived but very enlightening (for me, if not my students) stint as a creative writing tutor. In part V, I discussed the importance of the development of the weird novel to the survival of the genre in the twenty-first century, citing S.T. Joshi’s discussion of the trend in what he terms the modern weird tale. Joshi identifies three ways in which authors have attempted to match literary intention with commercial demand by extending the tale to the novel:
1. Writing a fantastic
narrative that has a real-world setting.
2. Writing a mystery narrative
with supernatural element.
3. Writing a narrative that is
structured around a complex supernatural situation.
He regards the first of these as difficult, although Harrison’s The
Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) shows how it can be achieved. The
second is cheating in Joshi’s opinion and while I might agree if the
supernatural element is superficial or gratuitous, I think the greater concern
is that crime fiction itself is better suited to the novella format (as
mentioned in part V). Nevertheless, Miéville and VanderMeer both show how this
can be achieved (without cheating) with The City & the City and Finch:
A Novel, both published in 2009. The third is Joshi’s recommended approach
and assuming that Absolution doesn’t completely change the series’
narrative trajectory, it seems precisely what VanderMeer has done in the Southern
Reach.
While I was researching The Conan Doyle Weirdbook (2012), likely in 2009 or 2010, I came across a short guide to writing new weird fiction and scribbled some notes in the inside cover of one of the key texts I keep on my writing desk. In spite of many hours – probably one or two days even – of searching, I’ve never been able to find the guide again. (I assume it was part of an introduction to an anthology, but I really should have found it by now.) There are three recommendations and I think they present a nice complement to Joshi’s list, albeit one focused on reinventing rather than transforming the genre. Based on my notes in the absence of the original, the recommendations are:
1. Extrapolating the internal logic of a speculative (or other) narrative.
2. Rewriting a particular narrative in a different genre.
3. Deconstructing a speculative (or other) narrative.
The first might be said to have been used by Kiernan in her extrapolation of her fascination with the figure of the selkie in The Drowning Girl: A
Memoir (2012). I have heard Miéville’s King Rat (1998) described as
a retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (c.1300), which is both
accurate and an example of the second. I have already provided an example of
the third in part III, with Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom
(2016), although I suspect this method would be difficult to sustain to
novel length. (I am also fairly sure that the guide was for writing new weird
tales not new weird novels). Whatever form the future of weird fiction takes, I
look forward to reading and watching more of it in TQF and beyond!
Recommended Reading
Fiction
Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2014).
M. John Harrison, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, Gollancz (2020).
China Miéville, The City & the City, Macmillan (2009).
Nonfiction
Jeff VanderMeer, Caitlín R. Kiernan on Weird
Fiction, Weird
Fiction Review (2012).
China Miéville, M.R. James and the Quantum
Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or? Collapse IV (2008).
Robert Weinberg, The Weird Tales Story (2nd ed.), Pulp
Hero Press (2021).
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