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The Weird and the Eerie
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The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher
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It appears that it’s available as an ebook from Amazon in the US. And there’s the public library option, which I might do.I’m inclined to accept the author’s distinction between the weird and the eerie.
I’ve watched recently some Missing 411 videos, which document cases of people who have gone missing in national parks and elsewhere, and assert that these cases are unusual and mysterious.
When a hunter goes missing in a park and hasn’t been found, that’s eerie. In another case, a person claimed to see in the tress an entity cloaked like the alien in the Predator movies; that’s weird.
I just read the introduction. I figured he'd discuss Freud's concept of unheimlich at one point, but never knew or considered there would be such a distinction between unheimlich, weird and eerie. He also argues that weird is "not quite" a genre, but rather affects and modes of being. I wish he had elaborated on that a little bit more, but maybe he will. I'm nonetheless very curious what else he has to say and can't wait to read more.
I just got my copy today all the way from Britain and read the introduction as well. There is quite a bit of jargon in it, or specialized terminology for which I have not had the graduate class to grasp it unaided. I have read some Lacan, but mostly essays involving mirrors, not the one the introduction refers to. I've also read some Freud case studies, but maybe not this one. To understand the Introduction beyond getting a gist of it, I would have to do some fairly extensive supplementary reading. I'll decide if it's worth the effort to do that later.I do wonder if Fisher is confusing the adjective "weird" with the genre. It's a common practice. I don't agree that weird (fiction) is not a genre, but it is one not easily defined or delineated. I am going to just try to read and understand what he means by weird and eerie being modes and how he defines each. That could be an interesting distinction to make. As he makes his general statements about what weird is, I compare his definition to what Mieville's Perdido Street Station is and find they match up really well. More on that later as he revisits and deepens his point, as I think he will.
The first chapter is on Lovecraft, and I am looking forward to it. He's the only unmitigatedly weird author or artist in the book's entire bibliography. Ballard, Poe, and some others Fisher mentions are on the periphery. But come on! Margaret Atwood? Please! The absence of Mieville and inclusion of Michael Moorcock and David Lynch leads me to wonder just how acquainted with the weird genre qua genre Fisher really is.
This quote is from the July 1927 issue of Weird Tales Magazine, in The Eyrie section (letters to the editor, by the editor - link below): >> If one were asked to name the author whose genius made the weird tale popular, the instant answer would be Edgar Allan Poe. We owe not only the weird tale to Poe, but we are also indebted to him for the word itself. Poe was not the creator of the word “weird,” but he rescued it from oblivion and made it popular, so that now the word is understood and used by everyone.
Lafeadio Hearn, in his chapter on Poe's verse, thus describes how Poe picked up this almost forgotten word and restored it to the language: "When you read in Idyls of the King such phrases as 'the weirdly sculptured gate,' perhaps you have never suspected that the use of the adverb 'weirdly' was derived from the study of the American poet. There were two words used by the Saxons of a very powerful kind, one referring to destiny or fate, the other to supernatural terror. 'Weird' is another form of the Anglo-Saxon word meaning fate. The northern mythology, like the Greek, had its fates who devised the life histories of men. Later the word came also to be used in relation to the future of the man himself; the ancient writers spoke of 'his weird,' 'her weird.' Still later the term came to mean simply supernatural influence of a mysterious kind. Poe found it so used and made it into a living adjective after it had become almost forgotten by using it very cleverly in his poems and stories. As he used it, it means ghostly or ghostly-looking, or suggesting the supernatural and occult. Hundreds of writers imitated Poe in this respect and now it is so much the rule that the word must be used very sparingly. It is the mark of a very young writer to use it often." <<
https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tal...
Yep. Regarding origins, many (most?) who bother to study such things date the beginning of weird fiction from 1923, the date Weird Tales started to be published. Was Lovecraft writing before then? Yes. And he was writing weird fiction. He was having trouble getting it published, but he was writing it before 1923. It's nice to have an origin date. I find 1923 more useful than any other. Hey, it just occurs to me. Our beloved genre is 101 years old!Weird fiction didn't start in a vacuum though, which as your quote indicates was recognized by Weird Tales, probably Farnsworth Wright, as early as 1927. Edgar Allan Poe was certainly writing fiction which had a lot of elements of weird fiction in it. So was Machen, who we're reading this month, Lord Dunsany, who we were reading much of last month, Algernon Blackwood, and many others, etc. Would I call any of their works weird fiction proper in terms of genre. No. Others might. Vive la différence. I, and some others who care about such things, call it proto-weird (fiction), and probably other things, horror, or some such form thereof (like Gothic horror) being the most prevalent.
Incidentally, not even Poe created his works in a vacuum. I would argue Mary Shelley's work Frankenstein: The 1818 Text is best classified as proto-weird fiction, settling once and for all the debate between horror and science fiction aficionados who want (or refuse) to have the work be classified in their genre. And Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley didn't write in a vacuum either...
"I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves." -Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Robert W. Chambers (The King in Yellow) and Ambrose Bierce's (Haïta the Shepherd) as well! :-)
"The King in Yellow is a collection of 10 short stories by Robert W. Chambers. It was first published in 1895 and could be categorized as early horror fiction, but it also touches on mythology, fantasy, mystery, and science fiction. The stories take place in America and in France, and exemplify the decadence and degeneracy of fin de siècle society."We read this as a group read a few years ago. I didn't get too far with it. I've been meaning to try again. The fact it has so many genres listed for it is always a good indicator of weird fiction. 1895 though, so yeah, proto-weird for sure.
"Hastur first appeared in Ambrose Bierce's short story "Haïta the Shepherd" (1891) as a benign god of shepherds. Subsequently Robert W. Chambers used the name in his late 1800s stories to represent both a person and a place associated with several stars, including Aldebaran. H. P. Lovecraft was inspired by Chambers's stories and briefly mentioned Hastur in The Whisperer in Darkness (1930). Later writers have also adapted Hastur in a variety of tales."
Ambrose Bierce died about 1914. Funny how we don't have a definite date or even year for that event. Anyhow, that story was important to weird fiction for sure. "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" was as well. Maybe we should consider reading these and other Bierce proto-weird fiction as a group read. It might be hard to separate those out from his other work, but maybe S.T. Joshi already did: Ambrose Bierce: Masters of the Weird Tale.
Dan wrote: "We read [The King in Yellow] as a group read a few years ago. I didn't get too far with it."I'd say the first half is worth it, the second not so much. It sort of moves away from the King in Yellow, and the last real good short story in the collection IMO is The Demoiselle d'Ys.
Dan wrote: "I, and some others who care about such things, call it proto-weird (fiction), and probably other things, horror, or some such form thereof (like Gothic horror) being the most prevalent.Incidentally, not even Poe created his works in a vacuum. I would argue Mary Shelley's work Frankenstein: The 1818 Text is best classified as proto-weird fiction, settling once and for all the debate between horror and science fiction aficionados who want (or refuse) to have the work be classified in their genre. And Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley didn't write in a vacuum either..."
I like the term proto-weird. It signifies that weird fiction grew, like a branch, out of something else, like you mentioned. Coincidentally, I just finished reading Frankenstein. Finally! I have noticed that some call it horror, while others call it science fiction, but I haven't looked closely at the debate. What are the arguments for and against both genres? I was taken aback by how little science went into anything that happens in that novel (Frankenstein is, to me, a necromancer), and I think i'd be more inclined to call it horror, although perhaps simply calling it a gothic novel is more precise. But proto-weird or even proto-science fiction too could work. Although it's not that big of a deal to have it one way or the other at the end of the day, I guess. It's still an excellent novel in my opinion.
Dan wrote: "We read this as a group read a few years ago. I didn't get too far with it. I've been meaning to try again. The fact it has so many genres listed for it is always a good indicator of weird fiction. 1895 though, so yeah, proto-weird for sure."That's exactly why I like the idea of the proto-weird/weird. Weird fiction is an amalgamation of abnormalities, an outsider, hard to pin down, an obscure encounter.
Dan wrote: "Ambrose Bierce died about 1914. Funny how we don't have a definite date or even year for that event. Anyhow, that story was important to weird fiction for sure. "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" was as well. Maybe we should consider reading these and other Bierce proto-weird fiction as a group read. It might be hard to separate those out from his other work, but maybe S.T. Joshi already did: Ambrose Bierce: Masters of the Weird Tale.."
I'm down for reading some Ambrose Bierce!
Dan wrote: ""The King in Yellow is a collection of 10 short stories by Robert W. Chambers. It was first published in 1895 and could be categorized as early horror fiction, but it also touches on mythology, fantasy, mystery, and science fiction. The stories take place in America and in France, and exemplify the decadence and degeneracy of fin de siècle society."We read this as a group read a few years ago. I didn't get too far with it. I've been meaning to try again."
Hmm. Why didn't you finish it? I'm eager to read it sometime.
I've read the next chapter too, by the way, which is focused on H.P. Lovecraft and specifically the (mode of) weird. I really loved it and feel like I've learned so much! I made lots of notes, so I'd like to read it again soon. Weird can be so many things. Fascinating!
For instance, he argues that the weird doesn't have to be supernatural, that it's about something stranger than our ordinary experience can comprehend, that real externality is crucial, (more specifically, encounters with the unknown), that it's about fascination, about the compelling. And he argues, convincingly, that neither suspense nor horror are defining features of Lovecraft's fiction.
There are two things that I'm not quite sure of, though. One is jouissance. Can anyone explain what that means?
And second, he says that Tzvetan Todoroc's definition of the fantastic is "constituted by a suspension between the uncanny (stories which ultimately resolve in a naturalistic way) and the marvellous (stories which resolve supernaturalistically" (18). I feel a bit dumb, but what does "suspension" and "resolve" mean in this context?
I read the first chapter, the one on Lovecraft, this morning as well, and really liked it. Unlike in the Introduction I did not feel lost at any point in this chapter. This chapter puts to rest one of my concerns, namely I wondered if Fisher was sufficiently well versed in weird fiction to write about it as a genre. This chapter proved to me he is. Because he does.His first point was really good, which was that weird fiction can be hard to define. Weird fiction is not defined by the supernatural. In other words, having a werewolf or vampire does not make literature weird. These beings operate on known parameters. A black hole, on the other hand, despite existing in reality could be a subject of weird fiction because we don't know all the parameters under which they operate. In other words, having an element of the unknown helps define weird fiction, not the supernatural.
I am not that familiar with Lacan's term jouissance either. Fortunately, Fisher defined it well. It helps when he states Lovecraft wrote for the purpose of fascination rather than horror. He wants to thrill rather than scare. And the bookish characters in Lovecraft's stories are drawn on by fascination towards dissolution, disintegration, and degeneration. They can't help themselves because they want to know something, not because they're trying to gain or conquer anything. That seeking for the joy of knowing is what I think jouissance mostly means.
So many good points Fisher makes in this essay. For example, one person in the group recently tried to make the case that Poe should be considered a weird writer. Fisher would clearly disagree with that too. Only he does so on more substantial grounds than I did. Fisher classifies Poe (as well as Hawthorne and Bierce) as Gothic writers. Lovecraft, and by extension the genre of weird literature, is different because of "Lovecraft's emphasis on the materiality of the anomalous entities in his stories. . . . The standard, empirical world of common sense and Euclidian geometries will be shredded by the end of each tale, . . .replaced by a hypernaturalism.--an expanded sense of what the material cosmos contains." With the other writers, the world usually returns to a normal state at the end.
This is also what distinguishes weird fiction from the fantasy of Dunsany or Tolkien. Fantasy doesn't touch upon the real world. The closest it usually comes is the portal through which characters have to transit in order to reach the fantasy world. In weird fiction there's no portal, no wardrobes to enter, no trains stopping at platform nine and a half, and no cyclones whisking you and your house away. You're already there, like it or not. Another feature of fantasy that does not have to feature in weird fiction is world-building. Lovecraft has no Narnia, no Middle Earth, just Massachusetts.
Whenever Fisher described weird fiction, I tested out his definition to see if it could not only be applied to Lovecraft, but to Mieville as well. And it could. In fact, Fisher went on to name Mieville's work specifically at certain points himself.
My only real disagreement with Fisher came when he kept going on about "irruption." He seemed to state that there has to be an intrusion from something outside our world to inside it for a work to be weird fiction. I agree this is often the case, especially with Lovecraft, but it's not a necessary condition for a work to be weird. Neither Perdido Street Station or The Divinity Student ever irrupt into our world. They stay in their own. Yet they're still unquestionably weird fiction, not fantasy. So what makes them weird? I would argue that it's because their worlds are still based on our world and its physical laws, just with a few differences that get explained, usually by becoming self-evident as the books go along. Middle Earth and Narnia on the other hand are completely foreign, in no way actually based upon Earth's physical laws and have no significant points of commonality. This is a really small point though, and it can be argued that even Mieville and Cisco are irrupting into our world in a different way.
I really liked Fisher's concluding point: "As is well known, not only Derleth, but Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell and many others have written tales of the Cthulhu mythos. By webbing his tales together, Lovecraft loses control of his creations to the emerging system, which has its own rules that acolytes can determine just as easily as he can." But can they? If an author took too many liberties, we'd point out the inconsistencies, wouldn't we? The leeway I give these other authors is in terms of their writing styles and points of emphasis in their stories. But whatever they do, they cannot contradict, or even re-invent, Lovecraft! They can only extend him, if even that is really necessary.
Dan wrote: "If an author took too many liberties, we'd point out the inconsistencies, wouldn't we?"Quite a few of the early mythos stories in Weird Tales were ghost written or edited by Lovecraft, and they in turn often contradicted or went on tangents from the stories published in his own name. One example would be using Atlantis as a backdrop, which Lovecraft was fine doing in other's names but rarely in his own. That's kinda the thing with myth(os|ology), an ever-shifting interpretation of deeper layers; it doesn't have to stick together, it almost never does when you look beyond the surface level.
Just consider how Cthulhu is referenced in The Call of Cthulhu, as a "great priest" rather than a god or old one or anything of the sort:
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. [...] This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway.
Yog-sothothery, as he would have said.
Per wrote: ΅Just consider how Cthulhu is referenced in The Call of Cthulhu, as a "great priest" rather than a god or old one or anything of the sort"I too would have found this unacceptable although that alone would not keep me from reading. I would just consider the author to be a bit of a goof for not better understanding the nature of Cthulhu.
The third chapter of Fisher's book is titled ΅The Weird Against the Worldly: H.G. Wells.΅ This made me read the Wells short story before reading Fisher's chapter, which I found here¨https://www.gutenberg.org/files/456/4...
Fisher makes the case for Wells' short story, ΅The Door in the Wall,΅ being in the weird genre rather than the fantasy, this because the protagonist doesn't step through the portal in order to remain in the distant land. It's an interesting point, and I see where Fisher is coming from, but I would argue the lack of transport in either direction makes the story neither fantasy or weird, but rather mainstream fiction, especially because the ending of the story is so ambiguous in terms of whether the events all took place in the real world.
The next essay revolves around an academic's discussion of punk rock group The Fall's 1980 third album "Grotesque." The album is available in YouTube to be listened to. Oddly enough, I should be familiar with it. It forms a part of the music my early 1980s fraternity members listened to. I became familiar with many bands like this listed in The New Trouser Press Record Guide. They're a fairly mild and innocuous punk group. Nevertheless, I've never heard of them before, and don't regret this at all. I find less value (meaning none) in their cultural contributions than Mark Fisher did.The next essay seems to be random observations on what Fisher wants a ridiculously wide definition of weird fiction to include. For example, "Is there not an intrinsically weird dimension to the time travel story?" My answer: no. Fisher does not go on to make an at all convincing case for this assertion, leading me to call it "random."
Fisher then goes on to give a lengthy analysis aiming to assert The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers should be classified as weird fiction. It generally isn't. It's considered to be an odd science fiction book to the extent it's considered at all. I have it sitting on my bookshelf actually. I read the first twenty or thirty pages of it many years ago and wasn't getting much out of it, so put it down to maybe be picked up later. This was long before my first weird fiction read. Maybe I should give the book another go. I have doubts I would agree with Fisher that it should be weird fiction. I suspect I would continue to consider it odd (rather than weird) failed science fiction.
The next essay tries to make a case for Philip K. Dick's work to be classified as weird. Again, I disagree. Self-aware paranoia about society and seeing conspiracy theories everywhere does not make a work weird fiction although we have read one work like that in this group: The Twenty Days of Turin. There is at least some nebulous case to be made for classifying Dick as weird fiction if one really wants to expand the definition there. Even still, Fisher's discussion of Dick's Time Out of Joint makes me very curious to read it. Perhaps I will nominate it for our group after all. It sounds like the plot for a Twilight Zone episode, most of which I definitely consider weird fiction.
I think you've hit the nail on the head; his observations and arguments seem a bit random at times, and now that I've read most of what he has to say about the eerie, I'm not very convinced. I enjoyed most of the stuff he had to say about the weird, but here and there it's hard to follow where he's going with his arguments, some of which are far-fetched and some of which went over my head. I think that's largely because I haven't read most of the stuff he's talking about. And he didn't always succeed in making things easier to understand for the uninitiated.
The last chapter in the weird section is on David Lynch. I'm familiar with his work on Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, having seen and loved both. I've not seen his last two films, Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire, which look to be discussed fairly extensively in that essay. I have been thinking I want to see them before reading Fisher's discussion of them.David Lynch's films, if written out in literature, probably would be weird fiction. I had not considered that before. Still, I'm not sure what making that observation gets us, where it takes us that we haven't been to before.
I'm struggling a bit with finishing this work. I find myself constantly wanting to delay reading a chapter until I have read the work or seen the film under discussion. But even when I have, what he says about a given topic doesn't seem to be that profound, just mildly interesting. He scratches surfaces in other words in a way that hints at more that could be said. Your review helped me understand to one extent why I felt like that. Defining something as weird, or instead eerie, a major focus of his, ultimately accomplishes little.
not really now not any more
Sorry. Didn't mean to get all eerie. Now, is that saying eerie because of what it included, or because of what it failed to include? I must read on to learn the exciting distinction. By Fisher's definition, I wonder if any and all surprise can be deemed eerie.
I think it's about the failure of presence. Punctuation is missing, context is missing, the person writing it is missing. And something about the temporal instability of the phrase. Who knows?
My review of this book: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...By the way, one interesting list of books that has this work third is titled "Hauntology": https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1... That's not a word (it has its own Wikipedia page) I knew before today!
Cool, I'd never seen that word before either.
Weird Fiction
Books mentioned in this topic
Time Out of Joint (other topics)The New Trouser Press Record Guide (other topics)
The Anubis Gates (other topics)
The Twenty Days of Turin (other topics)
Perdido Street Station (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Tim Powers (other topics)Farnsworth Wright (other topics)
ABOUT THE WEIRD AND THE EERIE
A noted cultural critic unearths the weird, the eerie, and the horrific in 20th-century culture through a wide range of literature, film, and music references—from H.P. Lovecraft and Daphne Du Maurier to Stanley Kubrick and Christopher Nolan.
What exactly are the Weird and the Eerie? Two closely related but distinct modes, and each possesses its own distinct properties. Both have often been associated with Horror, but this genre alone does not fully encapsulate the pull of the outside and the unknown.
In several essays, Mark Fisher argues that a proper understanding of the human condition requires examination of transitory concepts such as the Weird and the Eerie.
Featuring discussion of the works of: H. P. Lovecraft, H. G. Wells, M.R. James, Christopher Priest, Joan Lindsay, Nigel Kneale, Daphne Du Maurier, Alan Garner and Margaret Atwood, and films by Stanley Kubrick, Jonathan Glazer and Christopher Nolan.
Me here again. Honestly, I don't think this book really bears directly upon our beloved genre. One non-fiction book that does is Weird Fiction: A Genre Study. I really want to read this one, but a copy of this starts at $87.20 for Kindle, and goes for more than $90 for a print copy. I'm curious about what Michael Cisco has to say about weird literature since he is a major practitioner, but not that curious!
Mark Fisher's book that we're reading this month is in the field of Literary Criticism, my favorite course when an English major undergraduate. So, I am definitely in for this work. Even if the subject is not directly about the genre of weird literature, per se, it is about horror of a certain type. Meaning, it is still of interest to me, and hopefully a number of us.
The least expensive copy I could find was a brand-new book, sold by Blackwell, for under $11 (that beats Amazon by more than $2). That Blackwell price includes shipping and no tax since they're a British company, a good trick as I think they mail the book from a U.S. warehouse. My orders from them have never taken more than a week to reach me, and 4-5 business days is typical. We'll see. I put my order in this morning.