I am certainly not entirely denying the viability of the approach broadly shared by scholars like Joshi, Hurley and Aldana Reyes, or the merit of thinking about late Victorian gothic and weird fiction in relation to scientific discourses, but at the same time I think that weird fiction is not merely a reflection of the brute thingness of matter. I suggest that weird monstrosity and revolting subjects of the sort Hurley terms abhuman and Aldana Reyes identifies as corporeally transgressive can be read not only in relation to scientific discourse but also to metaphysical speculation that explicitly moves beyond a mechanistically materialist or wholly scientific understanding of the world.
This book sits alongside a tradition of thinking about the aesthetics of horror, exemplified in works like Terry Heller’s The Delights of Terror (1987), Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror (1990), Yvonne Leffler’s Horror as Pleasure: The Aesthetics of Horror Fiction (2000), Matt Hill’s The Pleasures of Horror (2005) and Korsmeyer’s Savoring Disgust: The Foul & the Fair in Aesthetics (2011). Insofar as these works investigate what is often called the ‘paradox of aversion’, they can trace their critical heritage back to ancient questions in aesthetics, such as those of Aristotle’s Poetics. This scholarship lies at the border between literary criticism and the philosophy of art and asks a question about horror fiction generally: why is it that we find the aversive emotions that horror fiction arouses to be pleasurable?
Awed listening at the known universe’s utmost rim
The story of weird fiction that this book tells is one of the genre becoming gradually aware of itself – or, to put it differently, of weird authors becoming more intentionally invested in a particular kind of aesthetic project. This book considers five authors in detail, two American and three British: Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson and Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Not only are these figures widely considered luminaries of the weird, their approaches to weird fiction are paradigmatic of the form of ontological horror story I consider: each articulates a metaphysical vision of an ultimate reality that always seems to recede from a wholly intellectual grasp but which can be partially apprehended through art and the affects it arouses. I do not think that Poe set forth to instantiate a new subgenre of the gothic, or even aimed explicitly to speculate about matters metaphysical – and yet, his stories seed the beginning of the weird. Haunted by the slow, horrifying deaths first of his mother and then his wife by tuberculosis, Poe writes stories of death-in-life, psychic breakdown and apocalyptic contagion, returning repeatedly to ideas of the Absolute and the convergence of matter and spirit. While his goal may not have been to grasp at metaphysics, he stumbles into a weird new way of thinking and writing about it nonetheless.
At the same time, a trajectory can be traced from Poe to Lovecraft in the content of their metaphysical explorations – the gothic tumour metastasising. Where the previously discussed authors break down distinctions between the human and the non-human in ways upholding what Thacker, in his description of German idealists and other post-Kantian idealists, calls an ‘ontology of generosity’,30 Lovecraft overturns this recuperation, exposing instead a reality utterly devoid of meaning, a world of endless suffering and pointless striving. The development of the weird is thus also a slide towards pessimism.
While the five weird authors differ significantly in artistic style and philosophical substance, they share a disdain for Victorian didacticism, for moralistic literature that seeks to indoctrinate its readers in a dogmatic fashion. Repeatedly emphasising emotion and feeling over the articulation of social or political commentary, these authors exalt in art’s affective power in their criticism, essays or letters. Unlike previous critics who have approached weird tales as idea-driven rather than emotion-driven, I embrace the aestheticism of these authors and position affect as central to the weird exploration of the unthinkable, an aesthetic gateway through which each story invites its readers to step.
In the weird tales of Edgar Allan Poe, the body becomes something alien, not-wholly-human. Consciousness, also, becomes something eminently strange, but rather than separating itself from the physical according to Cartesian conceptions of mind and matter, it forever bleeds into bodies or the surrounding environment. Focusing on ‘Ligeia’ (1838), ‘Morella’ (1835) and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), chapter 2 – ‘The Putrescent Principle’ – investigates some of Poe’s diseased and decaying bodies and the stories around them in search of clues into his often slippery ontology. Poe’s conception of a cosmos bent on ‘inevitable annihilation’, as he puts it in Eureka (1848), manifests in his fiction as a rapt fascination with decay, linking aestheticised disgust with a vision of the universe in irresistible decline.31 Poe’s weird tales of decay, this chapter thus argues, provide a glimpse of the entropic abyss of undifferentiated unity into which Poe hints that the universe will collapse – a dark Romantic ontology derived in part from the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling.
Building on readings of Poe and Schelling and on conceptions of disgust emphasising the interpenetration of life and death, I read Poe’s preoccupation with putrescence in terms of Schelling’s conception of the ‘Absolute’, a unity between the knowing subject and the world-in-itself bridging the Kantian division between phenomena and noumena. This chapter expands on an understanding of Poe’s metaphysics and complicates understandings of Poe’s anti-didactic aesthetics by linking them, through disgust, to Schellingian metaphysics. My aim here is not to claim that Poe is deliberately encoding Schellingian philosophy into his fiction in an intentional sense, but rather that Poe’s stories possess a metaphysical dimension that Schelling’s philosophy is useful in exploring. Fixated on the idea of consciousness surviving death, Poe’s stories propel us past the normal limits of thought into speculative philosophical terrain – but with a speculation always intertwined with and conveyed through palpable revulsion.
Poe serves as the logical starting point for this study for several reasons. Lovecraft, as previously noted, identifies Poe as one of his most significant influences, devoting an entire chapter to him in Supernatural Horror in Literature in which he describes Poe’s weird writing as ‘a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole’.32 A significant influence on most of the authors in subsequent chapters – far more directly so than the gothic authors who came before him – Poe is in many ways the progenitor of weird fiction, wresting the gothic further away from its roots in post-Enlightenment nostalgia for the social structures of the medieval period and towards the cosmic and the metaphysical.
Chapter 3, ‘Ecstasies of Slime’, examines the works of fin de siècle Anglo-Catholic weird author Arthur Machen, a fervent anti-materialist whose yearnings for spiritual ‘ecstasy’, a kind of withdrawal from common life, manifest not in the traditional sublime, as might be expected, but in slime and monstrosity, revealing a world of decadent horror and primal mystery. Reflecting on Machen’s mystic and aesthetic doctrines as outlined in his singular theoretical work Hieroglyphics: A Note upon Ecstasy in Literature (1902), I read Machen’s novels The Great God Pan (1890) and The Three Imposters (1895) as efforts to restore a vanished sense of sacred reality, banished from late Victorian life by the seemingly inexorable advances of a scientific materialism Machen saw as rapidly stripping the universe of its wonder and mystery. Machen’s writing presents a series