The Weird and the Ineluctable Human

Kahn Faassen and Pieter Vermeulen

1. Ineluctably Weird

It is a commonplace that the weird is an unstable and unruly category. The weird resists the traditional iconography of the vampire, the ghost, or the zombie, and instead stages “indescribable and formless” monsters.¹ It avoids the stale emotive protocols of the gothic, horror, and fantasy, and rather inhabits “the interstices of other forms.”² This intractability also pertains to the historical trajectory of the weird: a lot of ink has been spilt tabulating the differences between the so-called Old Weird and the New Weird, with the best of these accounts showing a recent shift toward a less horrific and more benign attunement between human and nonhuman lives.³ In this brief intervention, we want to track a parallel trajectory that, we believe, is more problematic. The Old Weird, we argue, was overwhelmingly marked by a covert dialectic in which the human and the nonhuman contaminate but never fatally undermined one another; indeed, the inability of the human to abolish itself was part of the point. In contemporary ecological mobilizations of the weird, by contrast, we observe a tendency to celebrate the weird as a feature of a disanthropic world—a world in which human agency has been absorbed by nonhuman forces. Such a complacently posthumanist attitude not only inhibits a productive engagement with the socioeconomic forces that cause and perpetuate the ongoing ecological crisis, it also misrepresents the peculiar force of weird writing. China Miéville has noted that H.P. Lovecraft’s writing “is a surrender to the ineluctability of the Weird”⁴; our point is that, both in terms of politics and literary form, such a surrender always implies the ineluctability of the human in the context of the current ecological crisis. And if weird writing knows this, critical elevations of the weird at times tend to forget it.

2. The Weird, in Theory

One place where this ineluctability is forgotten is in Benjamin Robertson’s recent study of the fiction of Jeff VanderMeer, None of This Is Normal. The weird is a key category in Robertson’s interpretation of VanderMeer’s project. This project commendably aims to push beyond the all too humanist remainders of the Old Weird, which, Robertson submits, still linger in VanderMeer’s early work. It is through the figure of Area X in the Southern Reach trilogy that VanderMeer’s work finally moves beyond the “residual humanism”⁵ of that early work and the “residual anthropocentrism”⁶ of the Old Weird. Area X operates “beyond the human sensorium,” in a realm where notions such as experiencing, registering, and understanding no longer matter, and thus it intimates a reality without humans.⁷ VanderMeer’s writing, for Robertson, achieves “an encroaching indistinction” beyond mere difference: “Area X manifests a radical difference, an adifference or abdifference.”⁸ What disappears, in Robertson’s VanderMeer, is the tension between the human and the nonhuman—a tension that has yet, we show in the next section, historically been the site where the weird operates.

What also disappears is an even remotely recognizable conception of politics. Area X’s indistinction, Robertson writes, equals a “liquidation of antagonism” that “bespeaks a weird politics outside of the Western anthropocentric politics based on the distinction between such differences as friend and enemy.”⁹ Yet at the end of the day, this so-called “weird politics” is no politics at all. Take Robertson’s description of how VanderMeer’s “fantastic materiality” redefines our sense of reality: it “has no truck with preconceptions of what reality is” and actively “modifies the world” in order to “introduce to a world without predetermined notions of reality the means by which to change it.”¹⁰ This contorted sentence repackages VanderMeer’s work of ontological (re)description as itself a significant political action. Paul Rekret has shown that New Materialism—the most important critical toolbox for Robertson’s book—has a tendency to posit a continuity between ontology and ethics, in which a relational ontology comes to stand for an ethically appropriate attitude of attention and attunement; in this gesture, Rekret writes, New Materialism neglects “the material constraints differentially mediating relations between human and nonhuman natures.”¹¹ In his recent The Value of Ecocriticism, Timothy Clark makes the related point that it is illusory to think that merely imagining an alternative ontology will somehow decisively address the ecological crisis—as if the causes of the crisis are not first of all a matter of economic and political power relations, rather than of bad ways of thinking.¹² Celebrating the indistinction between the human and the nonhuman is then not very useful—indeed, we argue below, it is not even weird. To appropriate Marx’s famous dictum: weird writers have only imagined the world in various ways; the mistake, however, is to mistake such imagining for change.

A second (and last) example of a dehumanized weird can be found in the diarrhoeic prose-poetry of Timothy Morton. The weird is, for Morton, as much a verbal tic as it is a technical term (Hyperobjects uses the term 40 times; Being Ecological 42 times; Dark Ecology 94 times—partly because Morton has decided to inflict the category of “weird weirdness” upon the world). Weirdness, for Morton, is a stable ontological feature of objects; in keeping with the tenets of object-oriented ontology, Morton emphasizes that things are irreducibly themselves, and that their essence withdraws from human access and relation. Weirdness, Morton writes, “means that we acknowledge that things (human bodies, quasars, spoons, slime molds and chalk) are not simply constructs made of other things—whether those other things are smaller (atoms), larger (processes), relational or correlationist (history, economic relations, the subject).”¹³ Weirdness is the overriding feature of an ontology Morton calls “[e]ssentialism minus the metaphysics of presence,” in which in all things “there is a weird essence that is and is not its appearance.”¹⁴ This weirdness, we learn, “resides on the side of objects themselves, not our interpretation of them.”¹⁵

The obvious problem here is how we can apprehend a weirdness that remains inaccessible to us. While the weird essence of things remains inaccessible, Morton turns to the aesthetic faculty, the human ability to recognize beauty in the appearance of objects, to somehow create a rapport between the human and the nonhuman object, thereby providing “evidence of the wrongness of solipsism” through a “weird coherence between me and a thing that isn’t me.”¹⁶ This recourse to the notion of the beautiful is a staple of theorizing about the weird: for the VanderMeers, for instance, the weird is marked by “the strangely beautiful, intertwined with terror”¹⁷; for Miéville, the weird is a beautified and defanged sublime which no longer “undermin[es] the quotidian” but seeps into a reenchanted everyday reality.¹⁸ Morton’s take on the relation between the beautiful and the sublime is slightly different from the VanderMeers in at least two ways. First, if for the VanderMeers, Miéville, and others there is a lingering tension between the beautiful and the sublime, for Morton, the sublime is fully subsumed by beauty: the sublime is “[w]ithin beauty, not opposed to it”; it is “the active ingredient of beauty.”¹⁹ Second, Morton emphasizes that beauty, like weirdness, is a feature of the nonhuman world, and not an aspect of the relation between the human and the nonhuman: “beauty,” we read, “just happens, without our ego cooking it up. The experience of beauty itself is an entity that isn’t ‘me.’ This means that the experience has an intrinsic weirdness to it.”²⁰

If, as we argue, the human is an ineluctable part of the weird, Morton—like Robertson—shifts the emphasis squarely to the nonhuman world. Given the influence of Morton’s work on a lot of ecologically attuned humanities research, and given that None of This Is Normal is bound to become a touchstone of VanderMeer scholarship—if only because it is the first book on the author!—it seems important to assess what we lose when we let go of all human residues. For one thing, the exclusive emphasis on nonhuman agency leads to a dedifferentiation that implies we all exist in a conveniently non-hierarchical soup.²¹ As we noted before, this downplays political and economic power relations. A second and related problem is that the weird wild world of isolated objects “swim[ming] about” in perfect self-sufficiency without need of what Morton calls “a reality adjudicator” (i.e., a human subject) is not quite what weird fiction delivers.²² The valorization of openness, attunement, attentiveness we find in New Materialism and also in Morton and Robertson sits uneasily with actually existing weird fiction, which does not quite reproduce the ecstatic openness of the human subject to the nonhuman other. Indeed, the subversion of the human/nonhuman binary which makes weird fiction such a cherished subject in the study of the nonhuman world is presented in actual weird texts as fraught and complicated.

3. The Weird, In Literary Practice

Old Weird fiction abounds with fantasies about transcendence and nonhuman becoming. Whether we consider Arthur Machen’s enduring obsession with what he termed the “withdrawal from the common life,” the panpsychism of Algernon Blackwood’s wilderness tales, or William Hope Hodgson’s imaginative forays into other dimensions, the preoccupation of Old Weird authors with sublime limit experiences is readily apparent.²³ We argue that these reimaginings of human and nonhuman boundaries are ineluctably anthropocentric, caught up as they are in all too human concerns about subjecthood and attunement to the other. If we consider Old Weird stories from a narratological angle, we likewise see that in order for weird stories to properly register as weird, they require the use of a human focalizer and/or narrator. The one thing that distinguishes the weird from customary horror stories, as Lovecraft famously noted, is “a subtle attitude of awed listening,” which suggests that a necessarily human affect (fear, awe) is an essential condition for these stories to work.²⁴

As such, weird fiction becomes a literature of wonder and re-enchantment as well as horror, ever circling around the problem of human cognition and the inaccessible in-itself of objects. Yet this choreography between the human and its others has less to do with the ambient attunement of the beautiful than with the irruptive force of the sublime—even if the weird often sustains that force beyond the irruptive moment. Typically, the presence of an unknowable other ruptures the status quo and puts into disarray the cognitive framework of the all too human focalizer. When we fast forward from the Old Weird to the Southern Reach trilogy, we see that the organization’s director, when confronted with the seemingly marvelous, has to remind herself that “this moment is the same as every other moment, that it makes no difference to the atoms, to the air, to the creature whose walls breathe all around [her].”²⁵ Contra Morton and Robertson, there is no sentimental recasting of nonhuman agents as ontologically weird and wonderful, but an emphasis on human affect and the recognition that this human reference point is essential for the generation of the weird effect/affect. The punchline of the weird remains invariably that the nonhuman was always already here with us (“There is nothing but border. There is no border”²⁶) and that the crisis of the apparent “irruption into this world of something from outside” is, in retrospect, seen to be merely an effect of the limitations of the human mind.²⁷

Without such finitude, there would have been no suspense, and without suspense, there would have been no weird affect—just cosmic soup that goes untasted. The transformation of the biologist into a nonhuman entity in the Southern Reach trilogy is a case in point. Upon seeing her horrifying double, Ghost Bird concludes: “Nothing monstrous existed here—only beauty, only the glory of good design.”²⁸ Ghost Bird’s status as—by this stage in the story—a fully nonhuman focalizer causes the weird effect to fall flat, and the biologist becomes just another creature, well-adapted to its different environments, “from the lungs that allowed this creature to live on land or at sea, to the huge gill slits hinted at along the sides, shut tightly now, but which would open to breathe deeply of seawater.”²⁹ This is Morton’s world, and it is Robertson’s world, but it is not weird, if that term is to retain any attachment to the history of the genre. In light of the tradition of the weird, the scene feels like a cop-out. Earlier on, Ghost Bird asks herself if she will let herself be constrained by the limits of the human imagination. Here we find the voluntarist attitude of openness towards the environment that Robertson and Morton celebrate but that is foreign to the tradition of the weird: “human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee. Did she want to ally herself to such a lack, and did she have a choice?”³⁰ In the confrontation between Ghost Bird and the biologist, Acceptance answers these questions, and the novel is poorer—or, at least, less weird—for it.

In the Old Weird, even in stories that do effectively employ the weird mode, the brush with the monstrous sublime rarely leads to a true nonhuman becoming—to transcendence or a dissolution into ecstatic indifferentiation. Rather than being freed of human subjecthood and dissolving into a cozy intimacy with other forms of life and non-life, of objects and hyperobjects, these stories confront the characters with their own exegetic drive, even as they show that drive to fail. Despite the unavoidable posturing of the narrators about the unspeakable nature of what they are about to describe, the narration doesn’t come to a stuttering halt when confronted with the radical novum, but instead doubles down on its attempts to describe this novum in terms that relate to its human observer. This “logorrheic schizophony” never crystallizes into clear mental images that allow the human focalizer to hold on to their illusion of mastery, but nevertheless acts as a kind of disenchanting failsafe, preempting the threat of dissolution that confronts the human by discursively cushioning the blow.³¹

We are never more plainly confronted with our ineluctable humanity than during the final crisis of the weird, when we are left with language, but this time with a language that doesn’t get the job done anymore. Thus we see the narrator in Blackwood’s “The Willows” blanch and draw back before the numinous forces of the island, which he evocatively describes to be “as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly,” even though his travel companion perceives them as “shaped and sized like a clump of willow bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface—‘coiling upon itself like smoke.’”³² Likewise, the narrator in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” describes the Old God as follows: “If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.”³³ Even though categories and taxonomies fail, language doggedly carries on, confronting its users and readers with the inadequacy of their conceptual understanding as much as their inescapable and indefatigable drive to keep trying to make the world relate to them.

4. The Weird and the Ineluctable Human

We observed before that weird writers have only imagined the world in various ways, and that it is misguided to mistake such imagining for change. On our reading of the Old Weird, it emerges that the weird has always known this. It has always been about the overreach of human mindedness believing itself capable of transcending itself—into nothingness, or into a changed world. The weird, in other words, is not a conduit beyond the human. It is an unsettling experience that reminds us that cognition and imagination alone do not make a better world. If the weird is an injunction to go out and change the world, it is so only because it registers the impossibility of changing it without making one’s hands dirty.

On this reading, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy has the appeal it does not because it performs a disavowal of the human but because it inscribes itself into the long lineage of weird writers who have struggled with the human’s fatally anthropocentric and pathetically anthropomorphizing drives in the face of a world that has increasingly revealed itself to be more vast and complex—as well as more vulnerable—than previously thought. As a result, the trilogy reflects an increasing awareness of the inaccessibility of the nonhuman other—so central to the object-oriented ontology espoused by the likes of Morton, as well as the entanglements celebrated by New Materialism—without trying to weasel out of what Robertson would call the “critique or history.”³⁴ VanderMeer’s weird does not leave the human on the sidelines. The trilogy’s depiction of the underwhelming character of Control and of the intricate dysfunctionality of the Southern Reach testify to the futility of fantasies of mastery, while human exceptionalism is time and again undercut by dangling the human over the uncanny valley of creatureliness. There are, to be sure, occasional lapses into experimental de-weirding, where the trilogy abandons the engagement with the complexity of human/nonhuman cognitive entanglement for an attempt to aestheticize and thereby sanitize otherness (most notably so during the encounter between Ghost Bird and the biologist). Yet for all that, the trilogy does not entirely opt out of the recognition of the importance of such very human forces as imagination and mindedness. We are not left with the comforting notion that we need only let go of our humanity in order to peacefully merge with what Eugene Thacker would term “the world without us” and blissfully participate in its unmediated primacy. Rather, we are faced with the realization that the contagion of the human and the real works both ways: Area X has already responded to us: it reshapes our understanding of ourselves even as we trap this ostensibly untouchable thing in our words—making it weird in the process. If the trilogy offers us any political take-away at all, it is the need to accept the ineluctability of human agency and responsibility—a responsibility that is not exhausted by the work of imagination alone.

Notes