Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between IV: Detecting the World-Without-Us – Rafe McGregor

 

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).

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).

The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor LaValle | review by Rafe McGregor

Tor.com, paperback, £8.82, February 2016, ISBN 9780765387868

Read on its own, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is a fine example of a novella in the hybrid genre of the weird tale – or perhaps, more accurately, the new weird.  In The Weird Tale (1990) and The Modern Weird Tale (2001), S.T. Joshi defines the weird tale as a retrospective category of speculative fiction, published from 1880 to 1940, that is essentially philosophical in virtue of representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out world view. The new weird was initially associated with China Miéville in the UK and subsequently Jeff VanderMeer in the US (although both Miéville and Joshi reject the term). In their introduction to the short story collection, The New Weird (2008), VanderMeer and his wife, Ann, distinguish the new weird from the weird tale in terms of the former combining real-world complexity with transgressive fantasy and contemporary political relevance. Read in conjunction with H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”, which was first published in Weird Tales in January 1927, The Ballad of Black Tom is a deliberate and definitive deconstruction of the original short story. LaValle takes one of Lovecraft’s most overtly and viciously racist narratives and reimagines the character, action, and setting represented by Lovecraft from a twenty-first century that is conscious of racial prejudice, social injustice, and police impunity. LaValle dates his story to 1924, when Lovecraft and his wife, Sonia Greene, were living in Flatbush and the real horror of Red Hook for Lovecraft was the extent of its multiculturalism, which stimulated his racism and xenophobia and fears of miscegenation and evolutionary reversal. In contemporary terms, Lovecraft believed he saw first-hand at Red Hook evidence of the white genocide conspiracy theory, which is one of the reasons he returned to his sanctuary in Providence, Rhode Island, after less than two years. LaValle is an African American novelist and short story writer from Queens, who lives in Washington Heights, and his complex relationship with Lovecraft is revealed in the dedication of the novella, ‘For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings’.

Priestess, by Justine Geoffrey (Martian Migraine Press) | review

My first taste of Cthulhu erotica, and I wasn’t left with a shadow over Innsmouth, if you know what I mean. My Dunwich was not fully horrored. The thing remained on the doorstep. Doom did not come to Sarnath. This 2013 ebook brings together four previously published titles: Anicka and Kamil, Red Monolith Frenzy, Yvette’s Interview and Green Fever Dream. It starts with a dedication to “Ramsey Campbell, the first man to render my veils” (sic). Anicka, “teen witch of Stregoicavar and High Priestess of the Black Stone”, is trying to summon Daoloth, from Campbell’s story The Render of the Veils, and she goes about that by having sex with her brother and anyone else she can lay her hands (and inhumanly long tongue) on. Favourite phrase here: “Daoloth activates your hyper-chakras”! The Render puts her on the trail of Justine herself, who might become the next priestess, and does become the protagonist for the rest of the book. The sex is usually gross but consensual, except when Justine breaks out “the Triple Word of Power”; the descriptions of unfortunate people like “the pinheaded mongrel freak” are much more offputting. The dialogue all appears in italics rather than within speech marks, which is a bit distancing, and a lot of apostrophes are missing, which is not at all sexy. The synonyms used for relevant body parts (“dripping vacancy”, “orgone-sheathed cockmeat”) can be quite amusing. Not my kind of thing, but I’m glad I gave it a try, and people in the market for Lovecraftian erotica may well find that it calls their Cthulhu. Stephen Theaker **

The Shape of Water | review by Rafe McGregor

Black Lagoon to Baltimore via the New Weird.

The Shape of Water, which was released in December 2017, received thirteen nominations for the 2018 Academy Awards – more than any other film – and won four, including Best Picture and Best Director. The film was conceived by Guillermo del Toro, who co-authored both the screenplay (with Vanessa Taylor) and the novel (with Daniel Kraus). The latter was released in March this year and publisher Macmillan are clear that it is not a novelisation, but a project that “has been developed from the ground up as a bold two-tiered release – one story interpreted by two artists in the independent mediums of film and literature.” I am not entirely convinced by this denial, having found the work lacking in the characteristics I associate with literature. The book should also not be confused with Andrea Camilleri’s 1994 Italian novel of the same name, La forma dell'acqua, which inaugurated the popular Inspector Montalbano detective series, was translated into English in 2002, and appeared on UK television screens in 2012. To return to the film, Del Toro’s premise picks up where an alternative Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954, directed by Jack Arnold) might have left off, with the merman or piscine humanoid captured rather than killed.