Flavors of the Strange: On Weird Fiction and Further Affects

It’s a common saw that we live in a weird time – things that would fascinate us for months fly under the radar these days. The fact that the US government has essentially acknowledged that UFOs exist elicits a yawn. Hobby Lobby trading in Babylonian artifacts doesn’t make us blink. US politics is just like that.

A meme of John Mulaney, referencing his most popular bit, which summarizes the sense of strangeness that I’m referencing.

Comparing this to the twentieth century, I’m struck by the overwhelming banality of the Weird as we sit at the twenty-year mark of the twenty-first century. We ignore it, we keep our heads down and just try to deal with the short-term issues with which we are forced to wrestle. I ask this, because I’m noticing figures from the 20th century are being brought in to more contemporary weird fiction: it really seems to me that Nikola Tesla is being replaced by Jack Parsons; in the past two years, I have encountered Parsons in more places than Tesla, and I got to wondering about who would be our 21st century Tesla/Parsons figure.

Jack Parsons, holding a replica of a car bomb for some reason. No one today can quite match this level of weird.

The thought of someone putting forward Peter Thiel (who seems like a less friendly and less interesting Hubertus Bigend to me) first made me laugh and then made me retch, and I cast the thought aside immediately thereafter. We have no haute weird icons, other than possibly Vermin Supreme. In fact, it really seems as if reality has flattened out and become overwhelmingly prosaic, despite the seeming weirdness that goes on.

So, before I get into the meat of what I’m talking about, I feel I should try to define the Weird.

In the Essay “M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire”, China Miéville defines the weird by saying that “The Weird’s unprecedented forms, and its insistence on a chaotic, amoral, anthropoperipheral universe, stresses the implacable alterity of its aesthetic and concerns. The Weird is irreducible. A Weird tentacle does not ‘mean’ the Phallus;(20) inevitably we will mean with it, of course, but fundamentally it does not ‘mean’ at all.” Given Miéville’s status as a luminary of the so-called “New Weird”, his opinion most likely matters quite a bit.

This is drawn from The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher’s last book.

The critical theorist Mark Fisher (and the subject of our ongoing series “Fisher’s Ghosts”) put forward the Weird as the double/inverse of another affect, the Eerie, both of which he connected to Sigmund Freud’s conception of the Unheimlich (treated previously on this blog here), writing of them all that

Freud’s unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange — about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself. All of the ambivalences of Freud’s psychoanalysis are caught up in this concept. Is it about making the familiar — and the familial — strange? Or is it about returning the strange to the familiar, the familial? . . . As we shall see, the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the “homely” (even as its negation). The form that is perhaps most appropriate to the weird is montage — the conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together. (The Weird and the Eerie, 10 – 11; all emphases original.)

In the introduction to their anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer write that

The Weird can be transformative — sometimes literally — and it entertains monsters while not always see them as monstrous. It strives for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledges that failure as sign and symbol of our limitations . . . The Weird often exists in the interstices, because it can occupy different territories simultaneously, an impulse exists among the more rigid taxonomists to find The Weird suspect, to argue it should not, cannot be, separated out from other traditions. Because The Weird is as much a sensation as it is a mode of writing, the most keenly attuned amongst us will say ‘I know it when I see it,’ by which they mean ‘I know it when I feel it’ — and this, too, the more rigorous of categorizing taxidermists will take to mean The Weird does not exist when, in fact, this is one of the more compelling arguments for its existence. (Excerpted from this sample.)

I find it notable that Fisher and Mieville both introduce companion affects (to use Fisher’s term for the category.) Fisher writes of the Eerie:

At first glance, the eerie might seem to be closer to the unheimlich than to the weird. Yet, like the weird, the eerie is also fundamentally to do with the outside, and here we can understand the outside in a straightforwardly empirical as well as a more abstract transcendental sense. A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance? What kind of entity was involved? What kind of thing was it that emitted such an eerie cry? As we can see from these examples, the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency.

and Miéville (ironically) writes of the “Hauntological”, stating that it is “a category positing, presuming, implying a ‘time out of joint’,(21) a present stained with traces of the ghostly, the dead-but-unquiet, estranges reality in an almost precisely opposite fashion to the Weird: with a radicalised uncanny – ‘something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it’(22) – rather than a hallucinatory/nihilist novum.”

In short, we have three categories here, which differ from the default (which I will term, for simplicty’s sake “the prosaic” – this is not to say that there are not further categories, merely that I wanted a similarly usable name for the default state.) To make an attempt to explain:

• The Prosaic is the default, ground-state of the symbolic order we’re treating here. There is a defined inside and outside, which are firmly defined and separated from one another.

• The Weird is about contact from within the symbolic order being made with something outside of it – and it tends to be a viral contact: by showing that this symbolic order is not total, it highlights the contingency of that order. Given that human beings are symbolic animals, we are the pattern-recognition-beast, this contact with the outside is traumatic – but insofar as it “symbolizes” anything, it doesn’t symbolize a hostility to us. It symbolizes our insignificance (and thus, I feel can be related to, but not equated with, the Sublime.)

• The Eerie is about the implication of an agency external to the symbolic order. The two key words here, in descending order of importance, are “implication” and “agency.” It is the shadow of an action we did not anticipate and struggle to understand. While the Weird may leave wreckage, the Eerie is all about absence: that which should be present being absent.

• The Hauntological may seem similar to the eerie in some ways, but it is less another name for the same thing than it is a rhyme or mirror-image. It is the violent re-eruption of the repressed: the Weird-seeming reappearance of that which has been pushed out of the symbolic order in question. Miéville gives as the skull as the archetypal symbol of the hauntological: almost as distant from the human face as the octopus which is commonly used to symbolize the Weird, but unmistakably suggesting the once-living person which once inhabited the dry bones in question.

So, now that I have the tools all laid out, I want to examine why the prosaic feelings still seem to dominate the 21st century. Have our norms just become elastic enough to accommodate? Or has something shifted within the culture to put blinders on us, to make our inability to see the strange armor-plated?

Promotional image for the X-Files; the show was the incubator for a lot of modern fandom culture.

The past thirty years has been quite a ride: in the 1990s, one of the biggest phenomena on television was the X-Files, which wrestled with the hidden weirdness of the 20th century (mostly in the form of aliens.) At the core of the UFO mythos was a nominally apolitical distrust of authority – the government was hiding something from us. They were hiding the truth. Of course, much of this distrust was coupled with (the publicly disavowed) white supremacist ideology. This gave us what could be called the Interbellum Consensus, sitting as it does between the Cold War and the War on Terror: the UFOlogical Weird and the Militiaman Hauntological.

This all came to an end with September 11th: it’s a cliché to note that everything changed on that particular day (at some point, I’ll do a retrospective; probably on an anniversary. It marked a phase-shift in American culture, after all,) but it did. All of a sudden, we had an eruption of the Eerie: the actions of the United States as an Imperial Power in the Middle East came back to haunt us and it was an intrusion from outside the Anglo-American Symbolic Order. There were, of course, Hauntological roots – the Gulf War had a repressed influence on American Culture, after all, but it was accelerant poured on the fire lit during the Reagan years, regarding our abandonment of the people of Afghanistan after they had fought our enemies.

The memorial at Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where Flight 93 crashed. This was the subject of possibly one of the best 9/11 retrospectives: Episode 22 of the podcast “The Relentless Picnic”, entitled “Shanksville”.

From 2001-2005, we lived in an Eerie period, grappling with a hard-to-understand agency from outside. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina moved us into the Hauntological period of the Aughts: the response of the Bush administration, could it be called that, was repressive, and following this, the goodwill enjoyed by the Republican administration seemed to falter. American citizens had been abandoned by their government.

Our fiction changed, too: the aliens left, and the ground started vomiting up zombies.

Also, contrary to popular belief, the idea of the dead returning to walk among the living isn’t a new one: there are many stories of the dead coming back to life entered into the historical record (as can be found in this episode from the Medieval Archives Podcast,) of course, none had the infectious component that has become essential in our era of germ theory and paranoia.

This mood was only exacerbated by the 2008 Financial Crisis: our crimes had come back to haunt us. Hell was empty, and all of the demons were here. We attempted to desublimate this and process it as a culture through the eruption of zombie fiction but, as potent as the zombie is as a figure, it was unable to do its job.

We could possibly view the election of Barack Obama as being an attempt to grapple with this on another front, electing a black man (actually a biracial Kenyan-American – so not 100% incorporated into the Black American experience, but having experienced much more of that culture than any prior president,) to come and save us from the mess caused by White America. Of course, Obama was a milquetoast, a centrist in revolutionary regalia.

Following him, the 45th President was elected, and he can only be seen as a reversal, an attempt to process things by sympathizing with the slasher in the house. Of course, the eventual sequel to a monster movie where the original monster is the hero generally signals that the franchise has run out of ideas. Try again.

So where is the weird – the True Weird – right now? Where is our Roswell, our Rendelsham Forest? Where is the attempt to grapple with that which lies outside of the symbolic order we find ourselves in? Have the conspiracies put up smoke screens, or can we just see that they’re all boring now that they’re run by people too stupid to hide?

Okay, okay, I’m getting off the rails.

We live within a symbolic system: human beings make sense of the world through analogy and metaphor, and for a variety of reasons that symbolic order is breaking down. Maybe it’s the 24-hour news cycle accelerating the profusion of news narratives; maybe it’s the cognitive dissonance caused by official responses to climate change; maybe it’s the shift to algorithmic, instead of chronological, ordering of information on the internet. I’ve treated this before on this very website, and I’ve said several times that “This! This is the cause!” But in the words of Frank Herbert’s mentats: “pull your questions from their ground and the dangling roots can be seen. More questions!”

In my mind, the Weird and associated affective frameworks are associated with the Negative Capability that I mentioned in the piece on the “Weird Procedural” – the ability to exist in the presence of a Grand Mystery without ignoring it or struggling to solve it (I will maintain that the Weird Procedural puts forward a model for functioning in this state, and is thus valuable.) Let us draw a circle around them, ironically enclosing them and leaving the prosaic outside, and let us label this circle “The Strange.” This is not to propose that they are necessarily subcategories of a hypothetical super-category called “the Strange”, merely that, for purposes of discussion, it is useful to have a term that refers to all non-Prosaic categories.

Once again, non-English editions seem to get better covers — which isn’t to say that I find the American cover boring, just that this is a powerful image.

Oftentimes, stories that deal with the Strange deal with the failure of Negative Capability: their heroes chase the signs and wonders of the Outside and are either destroyed, broken, or transfigured by it (Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, some of the best weird fiction of the past decade, is an example of this: the heroes of the story try to unpack the mystery and are all changed by contact with the Breach, trapped inside it, and causing it to metastasize and expand beyond its boundaries.)

Perhaps (and Edgar will be annoyed by me bringing in dialectics here,) it might be best to think of the Prosaic and the Strange as the thesis and antithesis of a dialectic that played out in the Long 20th Century, and the world we live in now is the resulting synthesis. We live in a world of a Cancerous Prosaic: a state where it feels like the symbolic order in which we exist is metastasizing and eating the outside incorporating things that would formerly be weird and turning them into the unremarked-upon furniture of our home. The Strange collapses into something like Miéville’s Hauntology – but instead of being a Hauntological Weird (skulltopus!) it’s becoming a Hauntological Eerie: we’re haunted by an absence, the sense that the meaning has been intentionally leached out of the world around us and that everything has been flattened down into nothing, and the suspicion that something wants it to be this way.

Like Danielewski’s House on Ash Tree Lane, the hallways stretch out where they shouldn’t and the floor plan doesn’t match what we expect. And, worst of all, we can hear something moving around, but we’re never actually going to see the damned thing, are we? And perhaps the minotaur we’re hearing – because what’s a labyrinth without a minotaur? – is suffering from the whole experience just as much we are.

So what can we do?

Let’s theorize some new categories of the Strange. Some younger siblings in our weird-eerie-hauntology family. The Metachronic, which we’ve already touched upon on this blog, seems to me like a friendlier version of Miéville’s Hauntological: the return of things which have been repressed or pushed aside, toys found in the attic that turn out to be a lot of fun, or potentially useful. Maybe there are similarly helpful, useful, or “friendly” versions of the other two?

Let us search for new weapons.

Edgar has stated that the Wondrous appears in Grossman’s The Magician’s Land in an unsubverted form; I haven’t had a chance to read it, but perhaps it would be a good addition to my list.

We can call the hypothetical twin of the Weird “the Wondrous” – the edges of the symbolic order cracking and letting in a healing light. This affect, I feel, is touched upon, and used as a bait-and-switch in the latter parts of Lev Grossman’s The Magician King: the plot line dealing with the goddess Our Lady Underground. Of course, Grossman used this as a trap, showing the people who sought the goddess in question, ached for healing and fulfillment, as duped by a deific conman and horrifically dispatched. More accessibly, I feel that a melancholy sense of the Wondrous is essential to Mark Fisher’s Hauntology – miracles were once on the horizon, but they have receded from our view, becoming hidden. A sense of wonder was long considered the hallmark of science fiction – and for a variety of reasons, it no longer works that way. More on that another time.

So what’s our good twin to the Eerie? What can be recuperated from the purposeful absence of that which should be present? How can the appearance of nothing when there should be something be healing and useful?

An excellent book — possibly the best one I’ve ever read written in a Lovecraftian mode.

What if we invert this: instead of the intrusion of the outside into the inside, what if this is the escape from the inside of the symbolic order: the Escape to the Outside. It seems to me that an example of this exists in Victor Lavalle’s “monstrous offspring” of H.P. Lovecraft, The Ballad of Black Tom. This book tells the other side of “The Horror at Red Hook”, Lovecraft’s most openly and unabashedly racist story. Lavalle tells things from the perspective of Black Tom, a black man supposedly working for the sorcerer Robert Suydam, who was the villain of the original story. He is promised liberation from the awful state of things, and throws himself into it, wholeheartedly.

It shows the monstrosities of Lovecraft’s mythos in a somewhat post-structural light: instead of being fonts of abject horror, they represent other ways of seeing the universe than the Enlightenment-derived rationality which Lovecraft championed, and which have since been called into question. The Inside has its horrors, too: fourteen of the twenty worst genocides happened in the 20th century, and only one of the top ten happened before then.

Maybe the Symbolic Order that we’re been so invested in isn’t all that great?

Maybe the twin of the Eerie – let’s call it “the Apostatic” – isn’t all that gentle, isn’t all that nice, but offers something we need. A bitter medicine that we can choke down and rely on to make our escape.

In this way, perhaps The Matrix gives us another model of the Apostatic, despite it being seized upon by Alt-Right idiots: it’s actually, more accurately in my mind, a highly metaphoric story of the transgender experience – becoming conscious of the systems in which we live and making one’s escape.

And perhaps escape is the right answer. It’s something to think about, at least.

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