Genre, Vol. 49, No. 2 July 2016
DOI 10.1215/00166928-3512285 © 2016 by University of Oklahoma
Introduction:
Old and New Weird
benjamin noys and timothy s. murphy
Rosa, the narrator of Robert Aickman’s (2014, 42) short story “The Real Road
to the Church,” ponders the arbitrariness of our symbolic constructions and
concludes: “Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void,
though they often do so but poorly and desperately.” Although Aickman preferred
the term “strange stories” to describe his work (Straub quoted in Kelly 2014,
vii), what we prefer to call weird ction plays with the conventions of ction to
expose us to the “shivering void” and to reveal those conventions as poor and
desperate attempts to ward off that void. In so doing, weird ction generates its
own distinctive conventions and its own generic form, but it remains an unstable
construction. This unsettling transnational hybrid of science ction, horror, and
fantasy was born in the hothouse of late- Victorian and Edwardian low culture
and reached maturity in the “pulp modernism” of H. P. Lovecraft (Sorensen 2010,
501 – 2). Since then it has led an appropriately discontinuous and mutant exis-
tence, tracing its path across cultural forms from pulp magazines to lm and from
lm to the graphic novel and more recently becoming the object of critical atten-
tion and even canonization. In 2005 the Library of America published a volume of
Lovecraft’s (2005b) best ction, and the voluminous collection The Weird (2011),
edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer, constitutes weird ction as a
sustained international tradition.
Although weird ction is a profoundly hybrid form, central to attempts to
dene the weird as a genre has been its estrangement of our sense of reality.
S. T. Joshi (1990, 118), a leading critic of the weird, has argued that crucial to
We would like to thank John Coulthart for providing the cover image for this issue.
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118 GENRE
weird ction is its capacity for the “refashioning of the reader’s view of the
world.” Carl Freedman (2013, 14) has argued that weird ction is “fundamentally
inationary in tendency,” aiming “to suggest reality to be richer, larger, stranger,
more complex, more surprising — and indeed, ‘weirder’ — than common sense
would suppose.” Nevertheless we should note that weird ction, as Aickman sug-
gests, can also pursue what Samuel Beckett called the way of “impoverishment”
(quoted in Knowlson 1996, 352), reducing our world to a “shivering void.” China
Miéville (2009, 510), himself a signicant practitioner and critic of weird ction,
stresses the origin of the weird in the experience of “awe, and its undermining of
the quotidian.” The Russian formalists argued that such “estrangement” (ostranie)
was the dening feature of poetic or literary language in general (Shklovsky
1965), and so weird ction would appear to be a hyperbolic instance of the liter-
ary, which is ironic considering it has often been treated as a subliterary phenom-
enon of “bad taste” and “bad art” (Wilson 1950, 288). Indeed, mainstream liter-
ary criticism has tended to view weird ction as a literature of ungainly linguistic
excess ranging from the n de siècle oridity of Robert W. Chambers through
William Hope Hodgson’s awkward grammatical pseudo- archaisms to Lovecraft’s
convoluted rhetoric of unrepresentability.
The very generality of these denitions, as those proposing them demon-
strate, requires development through close attention to the material and generic
diversity of the weird. To do so we propose and will develop here an initial peri-
odization of the “Old Weird” and the “New Weird.” The Old Weird can be dated
between 1880 and 1940, and the term is explicitly articulated with the founding
of the pulp magazine Weird Tales in March 1923. Mark McGurl (2012, 542) has
remarked on the appropriateness of this pulp origin, with “the pulpiness of their
original material substrate guring the rank, rotting mess into which the dig-
nity of even the most acid- free human structures can be expected to collapse.”
Lovecraft (1971, 296), as both critic and writer, explicitly adopted, defended, and
dened the weird tale as an instance of “non- supernatural cosmic art” in his
writing of the 1920s. Lovecraft both dened a previous canon of weird ction,
in writers like Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, and Algernon Blackwood, and
stimulated a number of younger writers to engage with the weird, including Clark
Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, and Robert Bloch.
The New Weird, a term M. John Harrison coined in 2003 (Davies 2010,
6), emerged comparatively recently and was established primarily with the c-
tion and criticism of Miéville. We can, however, trace the New Weird back fur-
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I NTRODUCTION 119
ther to the 1980s ction of Clive Barker and especially Thomas Ligotti. Ligotti
succeeded in avoiding the pastiche and repetition that had tended to dominate
post- Lovecraftian weird ction and formulated a new and desolate conception
of a fundamentally chaotic universe. This ability to rework Lovecraft beyond
the limits of homage is also observable in Michel Houellebecq, Brian Evenson,
and other writers of New Weird. Therefore we could dene the New Weird as a
period from the 1980s to the present that gained its most explicit articulation in
the 2000s. While this work often involved nonmainstream publication, we can
also see a shift toward more mainstream publishing and, in the work of Miéville
and Jeff VanderMeer, away from the short story or novella format preferred by
the Old Weird writers to the novel form.
These periodizations are initial points of orientation, and our interest is
not in solidifying a canon of the weird but rather in probing the discontinuous
and mutational form of the “weird archive” with “its tendency to grow post-
humously” (Sorensen 2010, 518). This involves attention to the weird archive as
a site of new entanglements and destabilizations of the distinction between high
and low culture, the literary and the nonliterary, modernism and postmodernism.
It also involves an attention to this archive as a site of generic formation and a
site of politics, which exists in continuity but also in rupture between these two
moments of the Old Weird and the New Weird. This engages questions of how
weird ction relates to the cultural formations that dene its historical emergence
and development, both large- scale ones like imperialism, fascism, communism,
and Fordism/post- Fordism and smaller- scale ones like the professionalization of
journalism and literary criticism. What follows is a necessarily selective initial
analysis of the Old Weird, the transitional period, and the New Weird to develop
the framework of this special issue.
The Lovecraft Event
Lovecraft’s ction and criticism constitute an event in the sense of founding the
weird and allowing us to grasp the weird as a new generic category. In 1927
Lovecraft wrote his inuential essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” which
both gave his new denition of the weird and, in a retroactive reading, constituted
a weird canon. For Lovecraft (2005a, 107):
The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a
sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breath-
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120 GENRE
less and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there
must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its sub-
ject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular
suspension or defeat of those xed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard
against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.
Lovecraft’s reading of the tradition allowed him to tease out the elements that
constituted weird ction and to distinguish it from the gothic, with its “secret
murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1960, 236) notes, in relation to Franz Kafka, how we can
identify Kafkaesque moments in writers before him, “but if Kafka had never
written a line, we would not perceive this quality.” Borges continues: “The fact
is every writer creates his own precursors. His work modies our conception of
the past, as it will modify the future” (236). Borges himself later wrote a “Love-
craftian” story that he also dedicated to Lovecraft, “There Are More Things,”
published in The Book of Sand ([1975] 2001). In the afterword to that collection
Borges (40) refers to Lovecraft as “an unwitting parodist of Poe” and to his own
effort at pastiche as “lamentable.” In the case of Lovecraft — who is also one of
the few writers to be adjectivized with “Lovecraftian” — this modication of the
past is carried out consciously. Lovecraft is able to come to terms with his own
“anxiety of inuence,” especially, pace Borges, in relation to Edgar Allan Poe and
Lord Dunsany. It was around the time of “Supernatural Horror in Literature” that
Lovecraft began writing what many readers consider the “great texts,” beginning
with “The Call of Cthulhu” in 1926 and ending with The Shadow out of Time in
1934. In this way Lovecraft modied both the past and the future to create the
weird.
Lovecraft’s tales of “dread of outer, unknown forces” became identied with
the “Cthulhu mythos”: the suggestion that the earth was once ruled by monstrous
alien beings and that these beings will rule the earth again. In his famous ctional
book of “eldritch lore,” the Necronomicon, Lovecraft (2002, 20) writes: “Man
rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where Man rules now.
After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent,
for here shall They reign again.” In developing this form of the weird, Lovecraft
drew on modern science and on modernism to craft a weird ction that was “non-
supernatural.” Lovecraft, a keen amateur scientist and an antiquarian, creates an
unlikely “bridging” between an idealized past and a traumatic modernity. In the
process he gures a strange “median” position that is at once avant- garde and
anterior to modernity.
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INTRODUCTION 121
In “The Call of Cthulhu” (written in 1926 and published in 1928), which we
could consider Lovecraft’s (1999, 165 – 66) manifesto of the weird, he demon-
strates this convergence of the currents of modern art and science with an ances-
tral horror, gured in the description of the home of the monstrous alien Cthulhu,
the ancient and alien city of R’lyeh:
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close
to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any denite structure or
building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces —
surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impi-
ous with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention this talk about angles
because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He has
said that the geometry of the dream- place he saw was abnormal, non- Euclidean,
and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.
In a key gesture Lovecraft translates the avant- garde forms of modernity — futurism
and the mathematical advances of non- Euclidean geometry underlying relativity
theory — into objects of horror.
Contrary to his image, which was deliberately self- fashioned, Lovecraft was
not simply a reclusive antiquarian obsessed by a heavily idealized New England
past. Lovecraft was familiar with the latest forms of science and art, although he
generally presents these as traumatic disruptions of order. While Miéville (2009,
510) has noted that in the Old Weird “a disproportionate number of its writ-
ers have distinctly reactionary aims,” Lovecraft’s reactionary position remains
integrated with a materialist and scientic worldview (Houellebecq 2005, 32).
Alain Badiou (2009, 54), discussing the possibility of reactionary responses to
revolutionary events, notes that “to resist the call of the new, it is still necessary
to create arguments of resistance appropriate to the novelty itself. From this point
of view, every reactive disposition is the contemporary of the present to which
it reacts.” Lovecraft produces what Badiou calls a “reactionary novelty” (54).
This materialist horror is certainly heavily implicated in Lovecraft’s racism.
The
“material” inscription of “race” in Lovecraft’s biological fantasy, his “nativist
semiotics” and “eugenicist epistemology” (Hefner 2014, 657 – 61), is embodied in
his alien beings and their “degenerate” followers.
Lovecraft’s disturbing novelty was not solitary. Instead, his articulation of
the weird was explicitly intertextual and engaged with multiple “platforms” of
the weird. In his youth Lovecraft was deeply involved in the amateur journalism
movement, conducting his own development as a writer in this “weird univer-
sity” (McGurl 2012, 542). Lovecraft is also renowned for his massive correspon-
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