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