A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror W. Andrew Shephard Studies in the Fantastic, Number 9, Summer/Fall 2020, pp. 171-175 (Review) Published by University of Tampa Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sif.2020.0010 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/763485 [ Access provided at 7 Oct 2020 04:43 GMT from University of Utah ] Reviews the environmental humanities, posthumanism, post-apocalyptic fiction, new weird fiction, or postmodern literary techniques will find much to think with—and to teach—in Dead Astronauts. — A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror A Review by W. Andrew Shephard Newell, Jonathan. A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror. University of Wales Press, 2020. 241 pp. $60.00 (pbk) Weird fiction has been undergoing something of a renaissance lately, among both academics and general readers alike. The former can likely be attributed to its perceived compatibility with critical theory, its ability to render the abstractions of certain aesthetic or metaphysical concepts into more concrete forms. Notably, thinkers such as Graham Harman, Eugene Thacker, and the late Mark Fisher have seized upon the genre as vehicles for philosophical discourse alongside the thrills. Jonathan Newell’s new monograph, A Century of Weird Fiction 1832-1937, navigates similar terrain but distinguishes itself by viewing the genre through the lens of affect theory—more specifically, through the Weird tale’s relationship to disgust. Drawing upon various theorists of disgust, including Carolyn Korsmeyer and William Ian Miller, Newell argues that the primacy of disgust as an affect within the Weird is largely due to the feelings engendered by our encounters with confused boundaries between certain ontological states. A key concept for Newell is Korsmeyer’s notion of the sublate, a sort of middle category between the awe associated with the sublime and the more negative affective response associated with disgust. Newell’s work naturally draws upon discussions of disgust’s centrality to horror and its sister genres. Notably, he describes his work [171] Studies in the Fantastic as building upon Noel Carroll’s argument from The Philosophy of Horror (1990), “the disgust monsters arouse is linked to the disruption of the categorical schema by which human beings make sense of the world,” but Newell uses this observation to different ends (11). While Carroll is more interested in exploring the paradox of horror as a genre whose central appeal lies in its reliance upon negative affects, Newell is interested in how such works can be used to explore metaphysical concepts too abstract to be engaged with in more realist texts. Similarly, Newell builds upon Kelly Hurley’s valuable exploration of the “abhuman” (itself an expansion of William Hope Hodgson’s coinage) from The Gothic Body (2004), but expands it beyond the notion of bodies that are categorically confused but self-contained to also explore confused boundaries between the human body and other types of matter, which frequently surface in Weird fiction. Newell’s text also represents a sustained inquiry into the Weird as a genre performing a kind of philosophical work distinct from adjacent genres such as the Gothic and Horror more broadly—one that privileges less anthropocentric modes of ontology, such as the relatively contemporary speculative realist and New Materialist movements. Structurally, Newell’s text bears some similarities to S. T. Joshi’s seminal tome, The Weird Tale; both feature a series of individual case studies of Weird fiction authors leading up to H.P. Lovecraft as an exemplar of the form. Notably, Newell’s periodization of the Weird tale starts earlier, with Edgar Allan Poe configured here as an important ur-practitioner of the genre. In Chapter Two, titled “The Putrescent Principle,” Newell situates Poe within the fascination with German Romanticism pervading the American literary market at the time when Poe was active. Beginning with Poe’s lengthy prose poem Eureka, Newell explores Poe’s fascination with the inevitable dissolution of the cosmos into entropy and links it to three of the author’s fictional works, “Morella,” Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” each featuring a female character suspended between life and death in some manner—a slippery ontological position which Newell links to German Idealist philosopher F. W. J. Schelling’s concept of the Absolute. In this and subsequent linkages between authors and their philosophical fellows, Newell is fairly responsible; he does not claim any type of direct influence from Schelling to Poe, merely an [172] Reviews ideological kinship in which the two mutually elucidate each other’s ideas. In Chapter Three, “Ecstasies of Slime,” Newell tackles the works of late Victorian Weird author Arthur Machen, contextualizing them within both the author’s passionately held brand of Anglo-Catholic mysticism and his fervent opposition to the materialist discourses of late Victoriana. Newell argues that for Machen, the various instances in which slime appears, often involving the dissolution of characters into a kind of primordial soup, are meant to evoke more than mere horror or revulsion. Such moments, he argues, such as Helen’s climatic death scene from “The Great God Pan” or similarly ghastly scenes from the novel The Three Imposters, are meant to gesture towards an encounter with the Godhead, in a Spinozan sense of the divine as suffused throughout nature. Particularly insightful is Newell’s citation of Machen’s own aesthetic philosophy from the book Hieroglyphics (1902) as a means of elucidating more obscure moments within the author’s fiction. Newell makes two particularly significant interventions with the next two chapters, which cover Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson—two authors who have suffered a paucity of critical attention over the years. In Chapter Four, titled “Horrible Enchantments,” Newell makes the case for Blackwood’s fiction as anticipating various critical discourses of recent years such as Christopher Hill’s notion of the ecological sublime and Jane Bennett’s theory of vibrant materialism. While Blackwood’s fiction is not as viscerally solicitous of disgust in the way many of the other authors are, Newell makes a solid case for his inclusion—highlighting the ontological confusion of boundaries between human and nature which typifies Blackwood’s work and puts his oeuvre in congruence with the likes of Poe and Machen. Notably, Newell is particularly attentive to the manner in which Blackwood achieves such affective responses in the reader, as exemplified by his reading of “The Man Whom the Trees Loved.” In this section, Newell highlights the ways in which Blackwood subtly attributes a sense of intentionality to the trees from the story’s outset, and such attention to form is a particularly rewarding aspect of this chapter. Newell gives a similarly anticipatory reading of Hodgson, framing his Edwardian era fiction in the context of theories from New Materi[173] Studies in the Fantastic alist critics such as Stacy Alaimo and Karen Barad. Newell makes an excellent argument for Hodgson’s fiction, so suffused with anxieties about contamination and unstable boundaries between the human and non-human, as being ill-served by the discourses of Object-Oriented Ontology, which have proliferated in the discussion of Weird metaphysics. Particularly noteworthy is Newell’s reading of “The Voice in the Night” as a grotesque inversion of Robinson Crusoe, the latter’s colonialist sensibilities becoming a proxy for an anthropocentric notion of the world and nature as readymade for us. In doing so, Newell takes a notoriously disgusting story within Hodgson’s oeuvre and suggests a greater depth to it beyond its more visceral effects upon the reader. Chapter Six, titled “Daemonology of Unplumbed Space” makes a useful intervention in the field of Lovecraft studies by pairing the author with the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, reading the tales “Rats in the Walls,” “The Colour Out of Space,” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” in relation to Schopenhauer’s concept of the metaphysical will. In doing so, Newell reckons with an underacknowledged but not insignificant condition in Lovecraftian metaphysics, namely the disparity between the mechanistic materialism to which Lovecraft openly subscribed and the levels of “unplumbed space” that cannot be reconciled with human scientific practices—the alien numinosity represented by the eponymous “colour” of Lovecraft’s famous tale or the outside dimensions traveled by Keziah Mason in “Dreams in the Witch House” (Lovecraft 28). Newell quite cleverly argues that similar to Schopenhauer positioning himself as a more pessimistic “New Testament” to Kantian aesthetics, Lovecraft synthesizes the aesthetic influences of his predecessors in the Weird into a more pessimistic strain in which the dissolution of self and ontic categories yields not to an encounter with the divine but a realization that humanity has never truly been distinct from the world-in-itself. In sum, A Century of Weird Fiction is an excellent addition to the field of Weird studies—one that renders dense and heady subject matter in a manner that is both concise and readable. One could admittedly take issue with the omissions of certain authors: Notably, M. R. James’s decidedly materialist strain of the ghost story, with its emphasis on tactile sensations and viscous fluids would arguably benefit greatly from being read in the context of disgust. But this is [174] Reviews a relatively minor quibble. The authors covered in this text are given thorough, thoughtful, and incisive analysis in their individual chapters and thematically complement each other quite well. Moreover, in the case of Blackwood and Hodgson, Newell has made a strong case that both authors merit considerably more critical attention than they have hitherto received. Ultimately, Newell’s text not only makes a convincing argument for the centrality of disgust to the Weird tale but puts the lie to the notion of it as a minor affect. Indeed, understanding the things that disgust us may be central to understanding much about how we relate to the world and each other. WORKS CITED Lovecraft, H. P. Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature: Revised & Updated. Edited by S.T. Joshi. 2nd ed., New York, Hippocampus Press, 2012. Newell, Jonathan. A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832–1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror. University of Wales Press, 2020. — Archaeologies of the Future by KT Thompson Škarnulytė, Emilija. t1/2 , 2019.Video, 3D remote sensing scanning, 18’00” At the end of Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė’s 2019 short film “t1/2 ,” a long-shot of a bedazzled mermaid draws us out to calm, open waters. From our aerial vantage point, the water’s ripples mark time like tree rings, with the scale of seconds instead of years. Like much of the film, for which Škarnulytė won the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, the scene unfolds slowly, but the pace creates tension rather than boredom. The figure swims away, ever closer to the top [175]