A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937. Jonathan Newell

rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">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,