Overview
Weird fiction is a fascinating genre that has been alive and strange since the late 19th century. And though some might think of it as a niche genre, major authors have published stories in it, from Edgar Allan Poe to HP Lovecraft to contemporary writers like Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville. What draws me to weird fiction is the way it psychologically teases the reader. I’m reminded by what Robert Macfarlane wrote in Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination:
As de Saussure said, risk-taking brings with it its own reward: it keeps a “continual agitation alive” in the heart. Hope, fear. Hope, fear — this is the fundamental rhythm of mountaineering. Life, it frequently seems in the mountains, is more intensely lived the closer one gets to its extinction: we never feel so alive as when we have nearly died.
Similarly, continual agitation is a characteristic of weird fiction, and it plays into the reader’s psyche. The genre presents the quasi-normal and then twists it into the uncanny. It plays tug-of-war with our emotions and ultimately confounds us. A room might turn into a non-Euclidean geometrical puzzle. Characters might seem almost normal, but not quite at all once you observe them long enough. One begins to wonder if macabre events are happening to a character or whether that person is just insane and imagining them. Maybe it is a genre that has more questions than answers. Plots are usually infused with super- or preter-natural distortion. Topographies and natural landscapes, and flora and fauna, become odd too–with predatory flowers, dolphins that have human eyes, or genuflecting trees that seem to be praying. It is the latter I want to explore in this short series–the ecological weird.
Why ecological? I believe that in earlier literature, many authors were naturally closer to nature. Sometimes they saw “the wild” as divinely created for them, but the world was not so crowded or corporate. Natural resources and places were more abundant, and this was remarked well in older fiction–yet many earlier authors also felt trapped and wanted to get away, like when William Butler Yeats walked down Fleet Street dreaming of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Today it feels that we are even further disconnected from nature than ever, and it does a soul good to get out of rooms and into woods, mountains, rivers, and lakes. The ecological is a good way to think about nature in fiction because it recognizes all species as being inter-connected. It diminishes boundaries between us and other life forms on Earth–other being a common trope in creating tension and divisiveness. Looking at the ecological, whether in weird fiction or in other genres, opens up a fantastic world that walls have hidden from us. It expands humanity’s critical thinking into understanding the other.
I think some philosophy and eco-critical thinking behind the realism of weird fiction is in order. Brad Tabas wrote a piece in Dark Places: Ecology, Place, and the Metaphysics of Horror Fiction, Miranda [Online] that was interesting to me–arguing that when writing about nature there is a deeper realism among weird fiction authors as they go beyond what we think we know. If weird fiction is, in part, a genre that questions the nature of things, just imagine what it can do with the nature of nature.
A deeper realism…is not to be accomplished by focusing on what we call nature, but may paradoxically be achieved by lifting our gaze above or beyond nature to the real. Weirdly enough, this meta-natural realism, not in its reality but in its expression, often seems to evoke what we call the supernatural, if indeed we understand this word to designate something that stands opposed to, or beyond, the Natural.
In this sense, the super-natural doesn’t have to mean Gothic ghostly things, but it refers simply to the unexplained, what we don’t know yet or may never know. So, though we know a lot about our natural world, we also don’t know a lot. That’s not to say that we have to accept the super-natural as real or believe in ghosts. The weird is, however, an expression or context in which to make ecological exploration interesting and thought-provoking. Tabas also terms this concept weird realism or weird naturalism:
As Jeff VanderMeer, for instance, explains, with reference to his weird naturalism, we live on “an alien planet filled with incredibly sophisticated organisms that we only partially understand…our so-called smart-phones and other advanced technology is incredibly dull and primitive next to the diversity and intensity of other life on Earth”. [Ibid]
Understanding the truly awesome nature of the other preludes respecting it, and fiction can play a role in helping readers open their eyes to the brilliancy of the wild rather than just the separate-ness of it. The reality of nature is not always pretty if we are bound in certain cultural trappings–for instance, our perceptions might be that worms are gross or decomposition is disgusting. Tabas’s study says that by lifting our gaze above we can see how weird fiction evokes heightened awareness and “yields a very deep ecology, an ecology that is not merely aware of the inter-connection of objects that are not human, but also of the strangeness and otherness of these objects and the places that their intermeshing generates.”
Examples of this exploration in weird fiction are many. In William Hope Hodgson’s novel The Boats of “Glen Carrig,” first published in 1907, right away we see boaters entering a lonely wilderness:
And it was at this time, when I was awed by so much solitude, that there came the first telling of life in all that wilderness. I heard it first in the far distance, away inland a curious, low, sobbing note it was, and the rise and the fall of it was like to the sobbing of a lonesome wind through a great forest. Yet was there no wind. Then, in a moment, it had died, and the silence of the land was awesome by reason of the contrast.
The mood quickly takes the reader into weird nature and introduces an unknown far-away sound, then immediately draws in the reader by saying it is like a lonesome wind–yet there is no wind. Similar tenor-setting is in Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, also published in 1907, which follows canoers down the Danube River, where they enter the strange:
The change came suddenly, as when a series of bioscope pictures snaps down on the streets of a town and shifts without warning into the scenery of lake and forest. We entered the land of desolation on wings, and in less than half an hour there was neither boat nor fishing-hut nor red roof, nor any single sign of human habitation and civilisation within sight. The sense of remoteness from the world of human kind, the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic–a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.
Algernon Blackwood painted a topography so fantastic in The Willows that I was blown away by his descriptions of nature–not just words on a page but a thing coming alive. And then he turned that wild beauty into a mysterious otherworldy occurrence that the two main characters were afraid to discuss, because talking about it might have made it real. Blackwood built the constant agitation I wrote about earlier. These two early examples are a tiny sample among many stories that express wilderness as it coexists with psychological horror. In this short series, I will go on to give other examples of weird ecology in fiction and examine the genre more closely.
Contemporary weird fiction, sometimes called the new weird, is increasingly related to what Tim Morton calls a hyperobject: “entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.” The examined object or place seen in earlier weird fiction becomes huge. Global warming is an example of one such entity. Dealing with this large thing in fiction sometimes involves breaking it down to something conceptual for readers, and other times, as with the weird, the hyperobject is written about with that gaze above, which blows our mind instead of soothing it. In Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy we are introduced to an “Area X”, where some kind of environmental catastrophe has occurred. VanderMeer has stated that the mysterious area was inspired by his reaction to the 2010 Deep Horizon Oil Spill. Yet, though the author is obviously concerned about such environmental catastrophes, you will not find any preachiness in the trilogy, only a mystery that reaches deeply into a landscape of weird ecology. The New Yorker stated that Jeff VanderMeer transcends “weird”:
He wrote three books—the Southern Reach trilogy—so arresting, unsettling, and unforgettable that even non-weird readers read and loved them. Broadly speaking, the novels, “Annihilation,” “Authority,” and “Acceptance,” are eco-sci-fi: they’re about researchers exploring a mysterious, deadly, and unaccountable wilderness called Area X. But they’re also experiments in psychedelic nature writing, in the tradition of Thoreau, and meditations on the theme of epistemic pessimism, in the tradition of Kafka. Often, speculative fiction betrays itself, becoming predictable just at the moment when it’s supposed to be “out there.” But the Southern Reach books make it all the way out. They imagine nature, both human and wild, in a new way.
–Joshua Rothman, “The Weird Thoreau”, The New Yorker, January 14, 2015
You can find a chat I had with Jeff VanderMeer here. (This was before Borne was published, another great novel.)
New weird fiction might more often deal with such hyperobjects, though descriptions of “new weird” include how it overlaps genres, subverts the more traditional fantasy cliches, and favors uneasy endings over consolatory ones. Readers like the new weird because, according to Rose O’Keefe of Eraserhead Press, it’s “cutting-edge speculative fiction with a literary slant.” [Wiki] It seems that when dealing with what Jeff and Ann VanderMeer described as a “type of urban, secondary-world fiction,” new weird fiction writers express concerns and fears of the increasing uncertainty of the Anthropocene. This fiction offers a modern-day spin on traditional weird fiction while also dealing with extinction.
Tabas ends his paper with:
The horror of the Anthropocene and the real of weird realism remind us of the inutility of trying to naively suture together the real and the Natural, even if this is clearly the ambition of most place-based writing and critical studies thereof. The weird expressionism of horror, in its striving to express the unnamable while leaving it dark, at least leads us towards a real appreciation of the difficulty of thinking and representing places, and indeed towards an appreciation of the way in which overlooking this difficulty fuels the destructive tendencies in our civilization. [Ibid.]
While I have read weird fiction all my life, it has been just in the last few years that I’ve really been studying how it fits into eco-fiction overall. Eco-fiction is exactly what it sounds like, though scholars have fleshed it out quite a bit: it’s ecologically oriented fiction in any genre. I’ve heard it called a “super genre” and a “composite subgenre.” It wasn’t until I began reading weird fiction in the context of eco-fiction, however, that I realized what a great genre this is for exploring nature. Weird fiction can also be a vehicle in which to advocate for the planet, but this type of warning fiction is usually very subtle, even if the author’s intent is real. You can find more at eco-fiction.com, a site I’ve run for just over four years.
I will post two more parts in this series. The next part will examine weird ecology in fiction up to the new weird (circa the 1970s). Part 3 will cover more fiction in the new weird and will explore how storytelling in the the Anthropocene might be an effective way to creatively handle hyperobjects such as global warming.
Further Reference
- Weird Fiction Review
- Unbound Worlds
- LitHub
- The Atlantic
- The New Statesman
- The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
The featured image is licensed for use and (c) Can Stock Photo / AlfaOlga
