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ОглавлениеIN H. P. LOVECRAFT’S short story ‘Cool Air’ (1928), the nameless narrator moves into a converted brownstone in New York. Alarmed by an odour of ‘pungent ammonia’, he investigates: the source of the chemical spill is the enigmatic Dr Muñoz, his upstairs neighbour.1 Despite the strangeness of the chemical baths that the doctor takes, his proximity proves life-saving when the narrator suffers a heart attack and lurches upstairs in search of help. Upon meeting the strange, reclusive man, the narrator is instantly but unaccountably repelled, nausea stealing over him despite his desperation: ‘as I saw Dr Muñoz in that blast of cool air’, he tells us, ‘I felt a repugnance which nothing in his aspect could justify’ (p. 133). Returned to health by Dr Muñoz, the narrator slowly befriends the curious and ‘and even gruesome’ (p. 135) physician. As the story progresses, it is revealed that using techniques of extreme refrigeration Dr Muñoz keeps a mysterious malady at bay, relying on what at first seems to be some combination of medicine and unusual cryonic science. As time passes, the physician hints at forces sustaining him beyond those explicable by science, speaking of how ‘will and consciousness are stronger than organic life itself’ (p. 133). But all is not well with the good doctor, for all his cooling technology and mysticism: he dwindles, eating less and less, talking often of death. An unpleasant odour develops in his apartment that has nothing to do with his constant chemical baths.
Then, one day, ‘the horror of horrors came with stupefying suddenness’ (p. 136): the refrigeration machine breaks. Dr Muñoz alerts the narrator to his need by thumping on the floor and cursing in ‘a tone whose lifeless, rattling hollowness [surpasses] description’ (p. 136). Kept in a tub of ice, the physician is rapidly declining, and there is a hint of ‘fiendish things’ in the air as the stench intensifies (p. 137). The narrator goes out to find workmen to repair the doctor’s machines but returns to discover the apartment in disarray. The only trace of Dr Muñoz is a ‘terrible little pool’ and a few ‘nauseous words’ of ‘noisome scrawl’ on a paper ‘hideously smeared’, as well as a ‘dark, slimy trail’ leading from the note to the couch ‘and [ends] unutterably’ (pp. 137–8). The words reveal that Dr Muñoz had persisted in a state between life and death despite having ‘died’ years before. His liminal state presents a host of ontological paradoxes, inviting the reader to question the boundary between life and death, human and non-human, consciousness and world, spirit and matter. What seems to be a story about speculative technology turns out to be a story that is also about speculative metaphysics, about the possibility of some horrific vitalism, life sustained by the power of the will rather than the operation of organs. Such philosophical speculations are not illustrated using the dry, detached tone of the metaphysician, however, but with expostulations of growing repugnance finally culminating in an awful confrontation with the doctor’s horrifically deliquescent remains.
‘Cool Air’ was rejected by Weird Tales for the intensity of its disgusting content. Lovecraft credits the inspiration of the story to ‘The Novel of the White Powder’, an embedded tale in The Three Imposters (1895) by Arthur Machen, one of Lovecraft’s literary heroes.2 Machen’s story, in turn, owes much to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ (1845). Both predecessors of ‘Cool Air’ are tales of putrefaction and necrotic slime, the horrific, undifferentiated sludge of decay; both also deal with ontological paradox and the breakdown of normally sacrosanct categories. ‘Cool Air’ and its fictional forebears dwell with both disgust and fascination upon things beyond the limit of thought: what it is like to be dead, what happens to consciousness after death and the mystery of thinking matter. Such stories are speculative portals, vortices through which realities otherwise unthinkable might be imagined. They seek to propel readers vertiginously into the realm of the unknown.
In Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), Lovecraft himself tells us that what he calls the ‘true weird tale’ must have ‘something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule’. He insists that in weird fiction
a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.3
A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror takes Lovecraft’s suggestion seriously to argue that weird fiction, through the means of an aesthetic experience generated by a form of disgust, allows for a moment of what the philosopher of art Carolyn Korsmeyer calls ‘aesthetic cognition’, a visceral aesthetic encounter allowing for queasy re-conceptions of reality. Beginning with the weird’s forefather, Edgar Allan Poe, this study traces the twisted entanglement of metaphysics, aesthetics, affect and weird fiction through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, considering along the way the attempts of weird authors such as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson to stage encounters with the unthinkable through the intuitively unlikely conduit of aesthetic disgust, before returning finally to Lovecraft and his own weird writing.
This book is not a comprehensive survey of weird or gothic fiction through the approximate century it covers. While it does deal substantively with figures who have often been neglected in weird scholarship – both Blackwood and Hodgson are surprisingly under discussed given their influence on later authors – it primarily addresses authors of what we might think of as the ‘weird canon’. The choice to focus on these authors allows the study to consider specific works at greater length, and avoids duplicating the efforts of works like S. T. Joshi’s exhaustive, multi- volume Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2012) or David Punter’s multi-volume The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1996).
For Lovecraft, weird fiction is a ‘composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation’ (p. 18). This book is an anatomy of that body and cartography of unholy dimensions, a gazetteer of the unfathomable, with Poe, Machen, Blackwood, Hodgson and Lovecraft for guides. Like the demonological grimoires of Johann Weyer and Jacques Collin de Plancy it is also a bestiary, a book of monsters and monster theory. Indeed, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s third thesis on monsters in his essay ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’ – that ‘the monster is the harbinger of category crisis’, a creature ‘suspended between forms’ that refuses ‘to participate in the classificatory “order of things”’ and resists ‘attempts to include [it] in any systematic structuration’4 – in many ways serves as this study’s theoretical starting point, alongside China Miéville’s contention that weird fiction is an iteration ‘of a long, strong aesthetic and philosophical tradition, one endlessly obsessed with questions of the Awesome, a beauty that is terrible and beyond-kenn-or-kennableness’, its ‘teratology’ renouncing ‘all folkloric and traditional antecedents’.5 Monsters in weird fiction break down the schema human beings use to make sense of the world, suggesting a cosmic outside always hovering just beyond the familiar world revealed by our senses. Absolute differences of essence are obliterated by the enmonstered reality that the affects of weird fiction convey. In other words, the monsters of the weird are uniquely useful to think with – and such thinking is inextricably wrapped up in feeling. Weird revulsion, I suggest, creates aesthetic encounters which help us to think about the unthinkable.
Gothic tumour
What exactly do I mean by ‘weird fiction’? The term is as categorically slippery as the realities it so often describes, originating with the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, whose tales of occult detectives, demonic monkeys and adolescent vampires often qualify as ‘weird’ in the sense that I use it here. Joshi stresses weird fiction’s nebulosity, noting that ‘if the weird tale exists now as a genre, it may only be because critics and publishers have deemed it so by fiat’.6 Despite the fuzziness of its borders, I side with Joshi in distinguishing the weird from the gothic and want to resist the urge to completely subsume the former into the latter. While Joshi’s objection to the umbrella term ‘gothic’ as employed by critics like David Punter is essentially historical, mine is primarily aesthetic and philosophical. I imagine the weird as a tumour of sorts growing out of the gothic – composed of the same tissues but unfamiliar, alien and yet not-entirely-so, at once part of its progenitor and curiously foreign to it. A literary excrescence, weird fiction shares many of the same tropes and trappings as its eighteenth-century host, including a fixation on negative affect. Where the gothic primarily generates what Ann Radcliffe calls ‘the gloomy and sublime kind of terror’, accomplished through a ‘union of grandeur and obscurity’ – a giddy Kantian thrill in which the human subject’s power is glorified – the weird revels in less rarefied forms of horror, derived not from the subject-affirming power of sublime fear but from the subject-dissolving power of disgust.7 While there are certainly gothic works that turn the stomach (The Monk in particular comes to mind), the disgust precipitated by weird fiction emanates from a specific source – the non-human world, what philosophers have called the world-in-itself. This book interprets the weird as a speculative and affective negotiation of the real, in its most elemental sense.
This is not to say that weird tales do not reflect the culture in which they were written – only that weird fiction is metaphysically rather than socially oriented. Weird authors do not share a single, dogmatic metaphysics, either. Their speculations are often contradictory, and a consistent ontological system cannot be neatly deduced from their texts: there is no single, coherent philosophy that weird in toto encodes. One of my central claims, however, is that weird fiction attempts to access a form of reality difficult to cognise, one radically distinct from the human mind and from an anthropocentric viewpoint. I also do not want to denigrate the gothic here, or to draw a completely immutable boundary between the gothic and the weird: obviously, there are works that traffic in both gothic and weird tropes and affects, including many that I discuss here. Rather than a rigid schema that simply deems a text ‘weird’ or ‘gothic’, I want to see the two modes as tendencies within a larger literary tradition, much as Radcliffe delineates differences between terror and horror. What I am calling ‘gothic’, as distinct from the weird, is a focus on the human past and the human mind – on the depths of the psyche, the weight of history, the hauntological, the human. This is not to disparage it, but rather to distinguish it from the weird, whose focus is instead on the non-human.
A brief survey of weird fiction may further clarify some of these competing tendencies within the horror tradition – the slow metastasis of the weird, so to speak. Works like William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), while solidly gothic, contain glimmers of the metaphysical vistas that weird fiction would later explore more thoroughly. It is Poe, however, who I suggest that truly inaugurates weird fiction avant la lettre, fixating, as this study suggests, on stories of mental metamorphoses, cosmic entropy and putrescence both physical and spiritual. During the middle of the nineteenth century, both the gothic and the weird went through what S. T. Joshi calls an ‘interregnum’, but in addition to Poe, various authors did produce a number of weird or proto-weird works.8 Some of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s texts hover between the classically gothic and the weird, perhaps especially The House of Seven Gables (1851), as do some of the works of authors like Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the Brontë sisters. Weird fiction and the gothic underwent a significant revival towards the end of the nineteenth century, as exemplified by stories like those collected in Le Fanu’s In A Glass Darkly (1872) and Charlotte Riddell’s much-acclaimed Weird Stories (1882). The genre overlapped significantly with the imperial gothic emergent at the time, exemplified by texts like H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1886), as well as with decadent texts and the ghost story, which often seep from the gothic to the weird, notably in the stories of authors like Vernon Lee, M. R. James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Saki and Ambrose Bierce as well, of course, as those of Arthur Machen, one of the key figures in this book.
The early twentieth century saw an explosion of weird tales, buoyed by the proliferation of pulp magazines. Three of the authors considered at length in this study – Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson and H. P. Lovecraft – are now considered key figures of the early twentieth-century weird, alongside writers like M. P. Shiel, Lord Dunsany, May Sinclair and Clark Ashton Smith. While the works of modernist and pulp writers offer many strong contrasts – the former embodying a kind of ‘literariness’, the latter often dismissed as ‘merely’ popular fiction – in content there are surprising points of overlap, visible in the use of techniques such as stream of consciousness in the works of writers like Lovecraft on the one hand, and in the vivid, often grotesque, frequently bizarre images found in the stories of writers like Franz Kafka. The genre would continue to flourish into the middle of the twentieth century, as seen in many of the stories of Robert E. Howard, Daphne Du Maurier, Robert Bloch and Mary Elizabeth Counselman. August Derleth – a champion and friend of Lovecraft’s – and authors like Ramsay Campbell, Donald Wandrei and Frank Belknap Long produced various tales during this period that drew explicitly on Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, the loose shared universe he and other weird authors made reference to via fictitious texts, locations and alien entities. Mervyn Peake’s monumental Gormenghast trilogy (1946–59) is also a notable here – a resolutely anti-Tolkienian fantasy rendered in opulent prose, set in a gigantic and surreal castle of immemorial age. However, a certain remission – a break between the weird fiction of the early twentieth century and its later revival – can be discerned in the first decades of the second half of the century, even while its influence could still be felt in adjacent subgenres and literary movements like the new wave of science fiction during the 1960s and 1970s.
During the horror boom of the 1980s and into the 1990s, many works trafficked in the tropes of the weird, including those by authors such as T. E. D. Klein, Clive Barker, Stephen King (on occasion) and especially Thomas Ligotti, whose stories of puppets, manikins, marionettes, monstrous hypnosis and the stultifying horror of the corporate workplace are perhaps especially noteworthy in their evocation of a determinist, pessimistic world view similar to Lovecraft’s. The weird has undergone a recent and vibrant renaissance in the twenty-first century as the so-called New Weird, whose key figures include China Miéville (also cited in this work as a theorist of the weird), K. J. Bishop, Laird Barron, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tanith Lee and Jeff VanderMeer. While consciously in the tradition of the original weird, the New Weird frequently incorporates elements from science fiction, urban fantasy and secondary-world fantasy, often taking place in wholly invented universes, and inflecting the weird with a contemporary and politically radical sensibility.
While weird fiction is typically ‘supernatural’ or ‘preternatural’ in character, I argue that despite (or, indeed, through!) its supernatural elements, it is engaged in a form of unorthodox realism. Quite distinct from the social realism or literary naturalism of late Victorian novels striving to depict everyday life with faithfulness to social reality, weird fiction estranges readers from mundane existence while remaining faithful to a deeper, profoundly asocial reality. The curious realism of weird fiction thus finds its closest cognate not in the various literary realisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but in philosophical realism – and especially in the recent philosophical project that has come to be known as ‘speculative realism’.
The weird world-in-itself
A philosophical return to thinking about the world-in-itself, speculative realism originates with Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Ray Brassier; it now includes additional thinkers like Timothy Morton, Levi Bryant, Ben Woodard and Eugene Thacker. Positioning itself against both a naive realism presupposing we might have unmitigated access to the world-in-itself and against what Meillassoux terms ‘correlationism’, upholding the ban on metaphysics established by Immanuel Kant, under which ‘we only have access to the correlation between thinking and being’, speculative realism strives ‘to achieve what modern philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossibility itself: to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not’.9 In The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant scathingly observes that
in metaphysics we have to retrace our path countless times, because we find that it does not lead where we want to go, and it is so far from reaching unanimity in the assertions of its adherents that it is rather a battlefield, and indeed one that appears to be especially determined for testing one’s powers in mock combat; on this battlefield no combatant has ever gained the least bit of ground, nor has any been able to base any lasting possession on his victory.10
To move forward, Kant argues, we must distinguish between phenomena – the world ‘as it appears’ – and noumena, or things-in-themselves. The minds of human beings utilise a priori categories of understanding in order to cognise phenomena, but the thing-in-itself remains always elusive.
This iron-clad emphasis on the way that objects conform to our thinking, in which we cannot know anything of the world outside this correlation, is critiqued by the speculative realists. Meillassoux urges us to wake from the ‘correlationist slumber’ induced upon us by Kant, to try to know the world as it exists in-itself, rather than confining ourselves to the correlates of our own consciousness.11 As Steven Shaviro recently put it, speculative realism calls on philosophers ‘to do precisely what Kant told us that we cannot and must not do’:12 namely to move beyond the bounds of the world as we perceive it, to leave behind what Ben Woodard evocatively describes as ‘the dead loop of the human skull’.13 The problem, of course, is the vicious correlationist circle which inextricably seems to circumscribe all thought and so doom us to ignorance of the world-in-itself. As Thacker explains, ‘the world-in-itself is a paradoxical concept; the moment we think it and attempt to act on it, it ceases to be the world-in-itself and becomes the world-for-us’.14 The second the world-in-itself is thought, it passes into the realm of consciousness and becomes enmeshed in the world of representations.
The responses of various speculative realists to the seemingly ineluctable correlationist ouroboros have been multifarious, to the point where some have disputed the very coherence of the ‘speculative realist movement’ altogether. Meillassoux, fighting back against the correlationist circle and the Kantian transcendental subject, turns to the idea of ‘contingency’ and David Hume’s denial of the necessity of the laws of nature. He ultimately comes to view the laws of nature as merely contingent and endorses a vision of reality as a churning ‘hyper-Chaos’, which he describes in terms suitable for a Lovecraftian abomination: a ‘menacing power… capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare’.15 Others, such as Harman and other adherents of ‘object-oriented ontology’ or ‘OOO’, while sharing Meillassoux’s antipathy towards correlationism, argue against the idea that philosophy can ever produce knowledge itself, claiming instead that philosophy ‘aims at objects… that can never be successfully defined but only indirectly approached’.16 Accordingly, OOO has set about exploring the gaps between objects and their qualities.
Adjacent to speculative realism is new materialism or neo-materialism, another loose philosophical movement, in many ways an outgrowth of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. New materialism is championed by thinkers like Jane Bennett, Manuel DeLanda, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, and finds its roots in an eclectic range of philosophers including Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Henri Bergson and Baruch Spinoza, combining vitalist and immanentist ideas about the ontology of life with the ways that actor-network theory calls on us to rethink the boundaries and distributions of agency between human and non-human. Like the speculative realists, the new materialists grapple with the relation between the human and the non-human in a non- anthropocentric fashion.
Many books have explored the various speculative realist and new materialist rejoinders to metaphysical antirealism and correlationism. This study is not among them, precisely, since it is not primarily a work of philosophy but of literary criticism: my intent here is not to persuade readers of some specific metaphysical system or to critique antirealism directly, but rather to show that weird fiction engages with philosophical quandaries pertaining to metaphysics that still vex philosophers today and which are becoming increasingly relevant in an age struggling to come to grips with the idea of a world that is not ‘for us’. Speculative realist philosophers have also shown an interest in fiction – particularly horror and weird fiction. Harman has considered Lovecraftian ‘ontography’ – the way that, in his view, Lovecraft’s writing presents reality as structured by tensions between objects in their full actuality and their sensual properties. Thacker’s three-volume series, The Horror of Philosophy, touches on weird fiction, black metal, Japanese film and more, exploring the intersection between horror and philosophy. Thacker begins the first volume with a discussion of demonology, presenting the demon ‘as a limit for thought’, unfettering the demonic from its theological origins and repurposing demonology ‘as a philosopheme’ that negotiates problems of being and the unhuman.17 My project is both an extension of Lovecraft’s suggestion that weird fiction concerns ‘the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space’, and, in a sense, a demonology of the sort Thacker envisions, which he suggests has not yet been fully realised.18 This study is thus aligned with many of the perspectives of speculative realist philosophy even if its aims pertain to literary criticism rather than metaphysics itself per se.
At the same time, however, some of the literary claims of the speculative realists have run the risk of reducing weird and horror fiction to allegory – philosophy dressed up with tentacles and fangs. This approach marginalises the affective power of the weird, which so many of its authors have specifically identified as the very ‘point’ of their work. Beginning with the stories of Poe and his ‘Philosophy of Composition’ (1846), weird authors have afforded emotional effects tremendous primacy. Machen, Blackwood and Lovecraft all uphold aesthetic attitudes broadly similar to Poe’s, looking also to aestheticism and decadence and largely endorsing the idea of l’art pour l’art while criticising didacticism; Lovecraft insists that ‘a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear’.19 Though many of Thacker’s claims in The Horror of Philosophy are illuminating, he returns repeatedly to a vision of horror fiction as fundamentally idea-driven rather than emotion-driven. At one point, Thacker argues that for Lovecraft ‘horror is less defined by emotion and more by thought’.20 I am not denying that horror fiction has ideas in it – ideas worth exploring. Indeed, much of this study will be spent unpacking the ideas voiced by various weird authors. But by foregrounding ideas at the expense of aesthetics, Thacker and his fellows neglect what seems to me the real engine of horror – affect.
This study intervenes in philosophical readings of weird fiction by privileging affect: the affective states of both characters and readers. In weird fiction, I suggest, affect and metaphysical speculation become intimately intertwined. Specifically, I argue that disgust is especially important for the weird, serving to impart a certain frisson of aesthetic pleasure while serving as a way of knowing – or, at least, of speculating. This is because disgust is centrally concerned with boundaries and borders – demarcations of selfhood and category. My project is to bring together two ways of thinking about weird fiction: one emphasising the weird’s metaphysical speculations, and another foregrounding the paradoxical aesthetics of disgust. In doing so, I aim to expand the study of weird fiction as a genre and to explore the unexpected aesthetic value of disgust.
Disgusting thoughts
Disgust and metaphysics may seem strange bedfellows. The former, intuitively, might be associated with the gut, while the latter clearly belongs to the brain, the abstract province of reason. Yet time and time again the things-from-beyond depicted in weird fiction seem calculated to repulse even as they arouse speculation around the contours of the self, the cosmos and the relationship between them. Noël Carroll observes that horror fiction typically deploys imaginary monsters to engender an emotion he terms ‘art-horror’, a mixture of fear and disgust. Carroll singles out the disgusting in particular, observing that monsters are not only lethal but, almost inevitably, disgusting. Carroll argues that the disgust monsters arouse is linked to their disruption of the categorical schema by which human beings make sense of the world: ‘an object or being is impure if it is categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or formless’. Monsters ‘involve the mixture of what is normally distinct’ by splicing together different sorts of creatures or by superimposing two separate beings (as in demonic possession, for example): they are ‘categorically transgressive’.21 Monsters disgust because they disrupt our ways of knowing.
Carroll’s philosophical objective is to explain the appeal of horror, unravelling what he calls the paradox of horror, one iteration of the broader aesthetic paradox of aversion arising in the face of art that elicits negative affective responses. I have different aims from Carroll, but his observations form a useful beginning. Because monsters are categorically impure, they pose an epistemological problem, introducing doubt into the way the world is perceived by characters and readers alike. Intermingling that which is usually understood to be separate, the disgusting invites ontological speculation about reality beyond our perceptions. Where in life we might not give the disgusting a second thought, swiftly turning aside from that which revolts us, in art, disgust achieves a kind of fascination. Even if disgust in art is more ‘transparent’ than other emotions, it rarely entails the same sensory intensity as it might in a non-artistic context; in art we are safe to experience and even savour what Aurel Kolnai calls disgust’s ‘macabre allure’.22 Moreover, the particular aesthetic encounters that weird fiction creates rely on a disgust generated by monstrous beings, defying categories more conspicuously than creatures that might disgust us in life. Formless, shapeless things, indeterminate creatures, chimerical monsters – all such weird horrors hint at the possibility of an undifferentiated, oozingly intermingled ontology, one in which organisms and objects are forever melding together in a weft of complex relations. Within weird fiction, the possibilities of such category transgression become especially fecund. Violently irrupting into the human world, monsters in weird fiction evoke a primal reality beyond our normal comprehension. They elicit disgust because they violate everyday epistemological intuitions, obliterating the familiar, thoroughly anthropocentric apparatus used to impose a sense of order on reality. At the same time, they open up a space for speculation, confronting us with the reality that lies beneath the correlationist crust. Necrotic hands burst forth from grave dirt, dragging us down into chthonic chaos.
Core to this connection between disgust, weird monstrosity and metaphysical realism that I propose is the idea that disgust, when encountered in weird fiction, can be used to facilitate normally foreclosed modes of apprehension, functioning as a cognitive catalyst for thinking of the kind that speculative realism and new materialism urge. Korsmeyer’s work adopts a cognitivist framework for affect in art, one that returns to the original meaning of ‘the aesthetic’ in philosophy – a type of ‘immediate insight’ derived from an art object, a form of knowledge ‘too particular to be brought under the abstractions of reason’. Reinterpreting aesthetic pleasure or satisfaction as a kind of ‘modifier of attention’ engendering ‘fascination, concentration, rapt attention’ or ‘absorption’, Korsmeyer argues that art can create an ‘aesthetic apprehension’ which ‘imparts the impression that one is on the brink of an intuition that eludes articulation in plain language and can only be approached by means of the artwork which induces it’, transmogrifying disgust into ‘powerful and transportive aesthetic insight’.23
The sublime, of course, has been more extensively theorised than disgust – even while disgust oozes in the background of aesthetics almost since its inception, because, as Winfried Menninghaus observes, modern aesthetics rests ‘on a foundation based on prohibition of what is disgusting’.24 I consider the sublime in its various guises as presented by the likes of Edmund Burke, Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, to name a few, as well as more recent reformulations of the sublime such as the ecological sublime, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans and the ‘sublate’ described by Korsmeyer. Central to my argument is the idea that disgust can provide a version of aesthetic experience in some sense profoundly parallel to the sublime but in another wholly inverse to it – a sublimity utterly shorn of anthropocentrism.
In thinking through the connection between affect, art and metaphysics, my work here builds on the recent theories of weird affect by thinkers like Miéville, an author of the weird as well as an academic, whose aesthetic formulations are addressed directly in chapter 4. Miéville’s focus on the affect generated by weird fiction is linked to ‘radical otherness’, which he compares (but does not equate) to the eighteenth-century sublime. As Miéville notes, however, the ‘Weird Affect’ is a ‘bad numinous’, closer to ‘sublime backwash’ than it is to the sublime itself.25 The aestheticised disgust of weird fiction operates much as the sublime does, transmuting negative affect into awe and even ecstatic delight, but where the sublime empowers the subject, weird disgust ruins and erodes it. My argument draws on theorists of disgust such as Colin McGinn, who considers disgust a pre-eminently metaphysical emotion, William Ian Miller, who describes disgust in terms of ‘life soup’, an undifferentiated organic substance of life, death and decay, and Susan Miller, who focuses on disgust as an emotion tied up in the question of subjectival borders and the maintenance of the self.26 I thus expand and develop Miéville’s observations around affect and the weird to argue that disgust is uniquely suited to facilitate metaphysical speculation in art. Weird fiction exploits disgust’s connection to impurity, the threat of dissolution and the porousness of the body to imagine new worlds beyond the boundaries of the human and the self.
This book also adds to a growing body of scholarship on weird fiction. I owe substantial intellectual debts to Joshi, who argues that weird fiction is strongly tied to the ‘philosophical predispositions’ and ‘distinctive world views’ of its authors. While Joshi is, by his own cheerful admission, a member of the ‘pedestrian school of criticism’, his attempt to try to ascertain the philosophical purpose in weird texts is foundational to my own approach. Joshi, however, is notably dismissive when faced with the occult and idealist metaphysics of authors like Machen and Blackwood, noting, for example, that he simply does not understand ‘the mystical temperament’. In his approach to Lovecraft, Joshi reveals an unsurprising reverence for mechanistic materialism, arguing that Lovecraft is perhaps the only weird writer, specifically ‘not excluding’ Poe, ‘whose world view is of interest in itself’.27 In contrast, my aim is to take seriously the metaphysical speculations of occultists and idealists such as Blackwood, and my portrait of Lovecraftian ontology complicates his mechanistic materialism considerably.
This book also extends a concept that the gothic scholar Kelly Hurley introduces in her seminal monograph The Gothic Body (1996): the ‘abhuman’, a monstrous or ruined subject ‘figured in the most violent, absolute, and often repulsive terms’, which Hurley links primarily to fin de siècle British gothic. As she puts it, ‘in place of a unitary and securely bounded subjectivity’, the abhuman subject is ‘fragmented and permeable’, forever on the edge of ‘becoming other’. Hurley’s account of the abhuman, especially its disgustingness, resonates closely with my conception of the weird monster, a figure of formlessness contaminating the human. However, Hurley’s theory is contextualised primarily in relation to late Victorian science, including ‘evolutionism, criminal anthropology, degeneration theory, sexology, pre-Freudian psychology’ and other discourse that vexed conventional understandings of ‘the human’.28 In this sense, Hurley shares a great deal in common with the mechanistic materialism of Joshi: both scholars are interested primarily in the ways that nineteenth- or twentieth- century scientific discoveries shaped gothic and weird fiction.
Hurley’s approach to horror and disgust has been influential, leading to such works as Xavier Aldana Reyes’s Body Gothic (2014), which shares with this work an interest in the disintegration of bodies and affects such as fear and disgust. For Aldana Reyes, horror fiction is rooted in anxieties around ‘interstitiality’ and the refusal of ‘absolute human taxonomies’, and he notes that what he calls body gothic ‘prods the limits of taste and decorum’. I have, like Aldana Reyes, an appreciation for the way that weird texts elicit ‘horror, shock or disgust in those who stand for a normative version of humanity’. Like both Joshi and Hurley, however, Aldana Reyes is interested in the ways that the revolting transgressions of horror confront us with a sense of ‘unspeakable corporeality’ and a kind of base materialism, one reducing not just human beings but reality as a whole to purely physicalist terms.29
I am certainly not entirely denying the viability of the approach broadly shared by scholars like Joshi, Hurley and Aldana Reyes, or the merit of thinking about late Victorian gothic and weird fiction in relation to scientific discourses, but at the same time I think that weird fiction is not merely a reflection of the brute thingness of matter. I suggest that weird monstrosity and revolting subjects of the sort Hurley terms abhuman and Aldana Reyes identifies as corporeally transgressive can be read not only in relation to scientific discourse but also to metaphysical speculation that explicitly moves beyond a mechanistically materialist or wholly scientific understanding of the world.
This book sits alongside a tradition of thinking about the aesthetics of horror, exemplified in works like Terry Heller’s The Delights of Terror (1987), Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror (1990), Yvonne Leffler’s Horror as Pleasure: The Aesthetics of Horror Fiction (2000), Matt Hill’s The Pleasures of Horror (2005) and Korsmeyer’s Savoring Disgust: The Foul & the Fair in Aesthetics (2011). Insofar as these works investigate what is often called the ‘paradox of aversion’, they can trace their critical heritage back to ancient questions in aesthetics, such as those of Aristotle’s Poetics. This scholarship lies at the border between literary criticism and the philosophy of art and asks a question about horror fiction generally: why is it that we find the aversive emotions that horror fiction arouses to be pleasurable?
Awed listening at the known universe’s utmost rim
The story of weird fiction that this book tells is one of the genre becoming gradually aware of itself – or, to put it differently, of weird authors becoming more intentionally invested in a particular kind of aesthetic project. This book considers five authors in detail, two American and three British: Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Not only are these figures widely considered luminaries of the weird, their approaches to weird fiction are paradigmatic of the form of ontological horror story I consider: each articulates a metaphysical vision of an ultimate reality that always seems to recede from a wholly intellectual grasp but which can be partially apprehended through art and the affects it arouses. I do not think that Poe set forth to instantiate a new subgenre of the gothic, or even aimed explicitly to speculate about matters metaphysical – and yet, his stories seed the beginning of the weird. Haunted by the slow, horrifying deaths first of his mother and then his wife by tuberculosis, Poe writes stories of death-in-life, psychic breakdown and apocalyptic contagion, returning repeatedly to ideas of the Absolute and the convergence of matter and spirit. While his goal may not have been to grasp at metaphysics, he stumbles into a weird new way of thinking and writing about it nonetheless.
At the same time, a trajectory can be traced from Poe to Lovecraft in the content of their metaphysical explorations – the gothic tumour metastasising. Where the previously discussed authors break down distinctions between the human and the non-human in ways upholding what Thacker, in his description of German idealists and other post-Kantian idealists, calls an ‘ontology of generosity’,30 Lovecraft overturns this recuperation, exposing instead a reality utterly devoid of meaning, a world of endless suffering and pointless striving. The development of the weird is thus also a slide towards pessimism.
While the five weird authors differ significantly in artistic style and philosophical substance, they share a disdain for Victorian didacticism, for moralistic literature that seeks to indoctrinate its readers in a dogmatic fashion. Repeatedly emphasising emotion and feeling over the articulation of social or political commentary, these authors exalt in art’s affective power in their criticism, essays or letters. Unlike previous critics who have approached weird tales as idea-driven rather than emotion-driven, I embrace the aestheticism of these authors and position affect as central to the weird exploration of the unthinkable, an aesthetic gateway through which each story invites its readers to step.
In the weird tales of Edgar Allan Poe, the body becomes something alien, not-wholly-human. Consciousness, also, becomes something eminently strange, but rather than separating itself from the physical according to Cartesian conceptions of mind and matter, it forever bleeds into bodies or the surrounding environment. Focusing on ‘Ligeia’ (1838), ‘Morella’ (1835) and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), chapter 2 – ‘The Putrescent Principle’ – investigates some of Poe’s diseased and decaying bodies and the stories around them in search of clues into his often slippery ontology. Poe’s conception of a cosmos bent on ‘inevitable annihilation’, as he puts it in Eureka (1848), manifests in his fiction as a rapt fascination with decay, linking aestheticised disgust with a vision of the universe in irresistible decline.31 Poe’s weird tales of decay, this chapter thus argues, provide a glimpse of the entropic abyss of undifferentiated unity into which Poe hints that the universe will collapse – a dark Romantic ontology derived in part from the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling.
Building on readings of Poe and Schelling and on conceptions of disgust emphasising the interpenetration of life and death, I read Poe’s preoccupation with putrescence in terms of Schelling’s conception of the ‘Absolute’, a unity between the knowing subject and the world-in-itself bridging the Kantian division between phenomena and noumena. This chapter expands on an understanding of Poe’s metaphysics and complicates understandings of Poe’s anti-didactic aesthetics by linking them, through disgust, to Schellingian metaphysics. My aim here is not to claim that Poe is deliberately encoding Schellingian philosophy into his fiction in an intentional sense, but rather that Poe’s stories possess a metaphysical dimension that Schelling’s philosophy is useful in exploring. Fixated on the idea of consciousness surviving death, Poe’s stories propel us past the normal limits of thought into speculative philosophical terrain – but with a speculation always intertwined with and conveyed through palpable revulsion.
Poe serves as the logical starting point for this study for several reasons. Lovecraft, as previously noted, identifies Poe as one of his most significant influences, devoting an entire chapter to him in Supernatural Horror in Literature in which he describes Poe’s weird writing as ‘a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole’.32 A significant influence on most of the authors in subsequent chapters – far more directly so than the gothic authors who came before him – Poe is in many ways the progenitor of weird fiction, wresting the gothic further away from its roots in post-Enlightenment nostalgia for the social structures of the medieval period and towards the cosmic and the metaphysical.
Chapter 3, ‘Ecstasies of Slime’, examines the works of fin de siècle Anglo-Catholic weird author Arthur Machen, a fervent anti-materialist whose yearnings for spiritual ‘ecstasy’, a kind of withdrawal from common life, manifest not in the traditional sublime, as might be expected, but in slime and monstrosity, revealing a world of decadent horror and primal mystery. Reflecting on Machen’s mystic and aesthetic doctrines as outlined in his singular theoretical work Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902), I read Machen’s novels The Great God Pan (1890) and The Three Imposters (1895) as efforts to restore a vanished sense of sacred reality, banished from late Victorian life by the seemingly inexorable advances of a scientific materialism Machen saw as rapidly stripping the universe of its wonder and mystery. Machen’s writing presents a series of monstrous regressions back into primordial abysses of time, potently incarnate in beings that deliquesce into mucus, sludge and protoplasmic ooze. Far from serving as representations of abject material thingness, however, such slime accrues a kind of sacramental status, animated by an immanent spiritual presence interfusing the shadowy illusion that is, for Machen, the physical universe. Disgust in Machen’s fiction is a means for gnosis, for seeing past the world of our immediate experience and ecstatically reuniting with the divine. Drawing on theorisations of slime and grotesquery such as William Ian Miller’s concept of ‘life soup’, this chapter interprets Machen’s slime as the unlikely manifestation of Godhead. I pair theories of disgust and impurity with late Victorian occult metaphysics and Meillassoux’s discussion of the ‘arche-fossil’, an ancestral remnant out of deep time that disrupts correlationist accounts of reality, to argue that the weird works of Machen’s ‘Great Decade’ utilise the surprising affect of disgust to impart the sense of wonder or ecstasy that he imagines as the raison d’être of ‘fine literature’ while simultaneously presenting an immanent onto-theological account of being.
The weird eco-fiction of Machen’s contemporary Algernon Black-wood, outdoorsman and Buddhist mystic, is the focus of chapter 4, ‘Horrible Enchantments’. I approach tragically under-discussed Black-wood’s tales of backwoods horror, including ‘The Willows’ (1907), ‘The Wendigo’ (1910) and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ (1912) using the ecocriticism and new materialism of Michael Marder and Jane Bennett. I pair these biophilosophical explorations of matter and life with theories of disgust, abjection and the aesthetics of horror, most notably those of China Miéville. The very difficulties inherent in conveying the unthinkable natural world are harnessed by Blackwood’s stories to cultivate a sense of cosmic awe, an ecological sublimity inseparable from a form of aestheticised disgust. Rather than confirming an essential alterity between humanity and nature – the dualistic, hierarchical configuration that characterises the conventional sublime and undergirds either a correlationist account of human consciousness or an understanding of nature as inert, mechanistic matter – Blackwood’s weird nature- stories entangle the human and the non-human in a rhizomatic mesh of non-human actants and vegetal horrors.
Chapter 5, ‘Disgusting Powers’, focuses on another author influential in the genre but marginalised in scholarship: William Hope Hodgson, known for his tales of nautical horror and supernatural mystery. Like Blackwood’s weird nature stories, Hodgson’s tales present nature simultaneously as an unclean, disgusting force from a terrible Outside – embodied in figures of monstrous lichen and abominable pig-monsters – and as infectious, polluting human flesh and minds. My examination of Hodgson – a mysophobe interested in physical culture – extends the new materialist approach adopted in the previous chapter, specifically drawing on theories of trans-corporeality advanced by feminist scholar Stacy Alaimo and on the agential realism of physicist and philosopher Karen Barad. I argue that Hodgson’s protagonists, even as they desperately strive to purify themselves through everything from carbolic acid to elaborate occult-scientific apparatus, inevitably become enmeshed in what Barad would call a form of ‘intra-action’ – an entanglement of material agencies which undermines accounts the subject-object dichotomy that speculative realists also find troublesome.33 I consider three of Hodgson’s texts: his (in)famously disgusting short story ‘The Voice in the Night’ (1907), his cosmic romance and novella The House on the Borderland (1908) and his occult detective story ‘The Hog’ (posthumously published in 1947). In addition to new materialist theories of bodies and nature, I utilise Korsmeyer’s concept of the sublate and Susan Miller’s theory of ‘horror’ as a particular form of disgust fixated on human powerlessness to show how Hodgson’s characters, for all their pretensions of heroic derring-do, are not human agents as we usually conceive them but beings of trans-corporeal flesh entrapped in a vision of reality-as-cesspool.
The final chapter of the monograph, ‘Daemonology of Unplumbed Space’, considers the weird fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, perhaps the best known author of weird fiction in history. My analysis focuses on the short stories ‘The Rats in the Walls’ (1923) and ‘The Colour Out of Space’ (1927), and the novella The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936). Like his predecessors, Lovecraft is concerned both with engendering affective responses in his readers and with forms of metaphysical speculation; in many ways, his work assimilates the influences of the four authors discussed in previous chapters, in terms of plot and imagery and in relation to the ideas underlying his stories. With Poe he shares a fascination with the decomposing corpse; with Machen, an interest in combining teratology, ancestrality and deep time; with Blackwood, a quest for seeking the universe’s outermost rim, the cosmic outside; with Hodgson, a phobic dread of the sea and of otherworldly contamination. In Lovecraft’s fiction the universe itself is a malignant force – a force I describe in relation to Arthur Schopenhauer’s ontology, which identifies the world-in-itself with an all-encompassing, non-sentient ‘will-to-live’. Key to Lovecraft’s works, I contend, is the revelation that even the most seemingly dependable human conceptions, such as those of selfhood and self-knowledge, are unreliable: his weird stories are rife with protagonists who, with spasms of revulsion, apprehend not only the emptiness of their human values but the reality of their own alienage, of the strangeness and repulsiveness of the universe, and of a continuity between human beings and that nauseating cosmos. The only solace from this endless horror lies in a dissipation of the self, a loss of ego kin to madness which I relate to Schopenhauer’s formulation of the sublime and to the nullification of the will in the moment of its apprehension.
The story this book tells is not always a linear one – there is no clear roadmap of the Great Outdoors. What emerges from my analysis is not a single, consistent picture of the unthinkable world-in-itself but a series of shifting visions, coalescing miasma-like to provide strange and sometimes unsettling glimpses of the reality we inhabit but imperfectly comprehend. My goal here is to contribute to a growing critical understanding of weird fiction as serious literature engaged in exploring meaningful questions about the nature of reality and our access to it, and to bring to the study of the weird new perspectives emphasising the cognitive and aesthetic power of disgust.
