Another Angle on the Weird
January 29, 2008
My son was playing with some foam shapes in the tub tonight and he held up a “2″ and a “4″ and said, “Look, Daddy. Forty-two.” And I laughed, and said, “Of course.” What other random number would he pull out of the tub? And then I realized he didn’t get the reference, and the more I thought about it, I’m not entirely sure any of us are really in on Douglas Adams’ joke. In some ways, his entire world-view was weird. But, if you will, weird by reasons of technology. I mean, we all accepted his weird because it was explained away by “Science Fiction.” Firmly reining in Clarke’s Law, Adams demurred, “No, any incomprehensible technology is still technology.”
In a roundabout way, we’re talking about the same thing. It’s still weird; it doesn’t matter how you label it. And yes, as Mr. Jessup mentioned earlier today, it’s a psychological weird. It’s not just the world shifting, it is our place–our perception of it–that has shifted. Dr. Bradley says in his little piece on the weird:
People are the manner of their stories–for example, a story presenting the “magic” as it is conceived within the cultural ideology of colonized people represents how they conceive of existence not only narratively but in the “real” world as well. Ill defining as this is, it demonstrates that there has been a narrative anxiety about the importance of understanding the self before understanding the landscape and whatever events occur there beyond the scope of a people’s worldview (making them “magic”).
We write to communicate, don’t we? To share something of ourselves or our condition to the rest of the world. If our view, if you will, is narratively anxious, then how we can hope to render into communicable text (or touch, to hang a reference out to Cat Valente’s recent LJ post about human contact) what we hope to share with another intelligence? Is the weird a way of saying, “This may seem like magic, but that is only because you do not have the wealth of history and inference and connotations bound up in the words I am stringing together.” Any metaphor, significantly removed from cultural tide pool, is indistinguishably weird. But that doesn’t mean it is any less potent, or any less pregnant with meaning.
If the New Weird argued that magic had a place in urban, modern, settings, then we ask you consider why do we still insist on calling it “magic.” Why do we lash ourselves to any of the language used in the last three hundred years to describe the “un”-human? Yes, “faery” and “vampire” and “lycanthropy” are useful tools because they give our audience something familiar, something to which they can cling as they are thrown into the textual sea, but these words are also boat anchors that will drag you down. We are children of the 21st century. We are hurtling towards “trans-” and “post-” in our humanity. Why is our language, our fantastic literature, not already there? Why is it not showing us the way? Urging us ever on?
To sling back around to Cat Valente’s ‘O Human Child’ post again: “Bereft of that naked, bare ability to ask for simple contact without background radiation of adult weirdness, weren’t we really just holding our arms out to each other and plaintively whispering I want to touch you again?” Is that not what we strive to do with language? Is that not what we strive to discover in ourselves by writing? To get beneath our own fleshy armor and our psychic shields, and touch that luminous part of ourselves that makes such creative acts possible.
Isn’t it weird that we’ve stopped asking ourselves what is beyond the limits of our imaginations? That we’ve given up on the fantastic possibility of the creative impulse (to be fair, I’m talking the vast majority of the world who is content to sit at home and wait for the Martians to drop in and show us that we’re not the top of the food chain). Isn’t it weird that we made up all the words that became holy writ, and now we’re afraid to wonder how else they might be arranged. Isn’t it weird that we spend our lives struggling so hard on basal, menial, material tasks that we are too tired to dream? Isn’t it weird that Douglas Adams said that the answer was “42,” and no one presented a counter-argument.
The Next Weird should teach us all how to forget what it is to be “human.” We’re done with that, gang. It’s time to move on.
Transhumanist fantasy- an angle on the next weird that I haven’t even thought of! Sort of like taking the post-human of scifi and applying a fantastical lens to it.
I think that is one aspect of the Next Weird, and yet it’s not at the same time. Mostly because it’s very much about being human- it’s about being human in a painful, burning way. I really think next weird is a psychological take on the fantastical- and yes, why do we insist on using words magic, why do insist on taking the fantastical and making it other?
So far, one of the brilliant parts of next weird (and why it is weirder than weird, stranger than strange) is that it is not taking the seeping unreality and naming it- not segregating it, transforming it into the other. It is letting it breathe, letting it sit still and invade our mind like a parasite.
Next Weird is showing fantasy for what it is, fiction for what it is- a psychological narrative, a mess of symbols and signs representing some sort of shape and geometry of structure that mimics the way the human mind sees itself. In a form of mythic context, a reality lens that distorts into a narrative arc and dream like context.
Or something.
“We are children of the 21st century. We are hurtling towards “trans-” and “post-” in our humanity. Why is our language, our fantastic literature, not already there? Why is it not showing us the way? Urging us ever on?”
I was thinking about this tangentially last night as I watched an Anime called “Howl’s Moving Castle” (which is excellent, btw).
In America, we see a very stable, formulaic, and sanitized set of movies and TV. These shows feed the central core of how our culture processes and understands information. Wierdness comes in small bursts like Terry Gilliam films or societally-weird films like Little Miss Sunshine — and the vast majority of people I’ve tried to get to watch these movies say, “I don’t care for stories like that. I don’t understand them.”
“Howl’s Moving Castle” is a second-world Victorian/Napoleonic Wars Steam Punk where all the steam is powered by magic and wizards are all lycanthropes of some sort. And its Japanese Animation. And the Japanese have been doing weird movies for years and years. Wierd is mainstream over there, its just never caught on in America.
Sometimes I look at New Weird and what we’re currently writing and think if we were in “a race for wierd” with Anime, we might be lagging behind. Has anime directly impacted anyone’s work around here?
I think there’s a lot going on in anime and in other graphic mediums (European graphic novels, for example) that is miles ahead of where we are. And yes, I’m constantly looking over there to see how far they’ve moved the posts.
Dude- you do know that Howl’s Moving Castle was a book first? In English? By the none-other-than awesome Diana Wynne Jones? And that it sold quite a bit?
Anyway, I didn’t think Howl’s was that weird. Paprika was pretty weird, but the ending was rushed and lacked an actual tension that was seen in the early pieces of the movie.
>> In a form of mythic context, a reality lens that distorts into a narrative arc and dream like context.
Yes, I think that’s part of where I’m heading. I’m thinking through some basal definitions and I think “human” is one word that I am coming around to equate with the meat sack mentality–that sense of animal passions and sentiments that we’ve grown so used to. It’s the evolutionary picture that leads from fish to fowl to ape to man. “Human” is where we’ve stopped, and I think the mythic context, the reality distortion lens is the next image in that chain. I think it will be as different as we “humans” are to the homo erectus behind us. That’s not to say that we won’t be human, just that, like “magic,” it’s a word that I think will drag us down.
I definitely agree that most ideas behind the fantastic have long since become bankrupt. “Magic” is definitely a fine example. Traditional fantasy tropes have become familiar, and thereby safe, and thereby bereft of power. They have become constraints rather than points of departure.
I think getting in touch with the weird gives us that ability to really remove ourselves from the context of reality, even if thats what the story is nominally set in. It allows distance, without distancing the reader. It’s a delicate balance, but powerful when it occurs. Distancing readers from reality, from humanity, allows a wealth of philosophizing to be done, of ideas to be tested.
Right! I guess another name for this could be ontological fantasy, lol.
Anyway, I agree. i was just thinking the other day that fantasy has lost most of it’s wonder, and that one of the neat aspects of the next weird is returning it, through a sense of over the top weirdness.
“Dude- you do know that Howl’s Moving Castle was a book first? In English? By the none-other-than awesome Diana Wynne Jones? And that it sold quite a bit?”
No. I’m the outsider, remember?
Part of the reason I hang out with you guys is so I will be more informed. 
I don’t know if the book Howl’s Moving Castle is weird or not, but the movie was definitely a strange experience. It seemed to fit with a lot of the lines of the New Weird that I have seen you guys describe. But, you know, I’ve only got a hammer right now, and everything looks like a nail.
I fear I may have missed your point, for my reaction to this is if our view isn’t narratively anxious, how can we hope . . . &c. Anxiety, as its bandied about in the cogno-theory clubs, isn’t about being nervous or hesitant or un-articulatory—its the base motivation behind cognition, expression, action, and even perception. You, the body-mind that is Teppo, are anxious about the state of the world “out there”—you are anxious about the need to acquire and consume food, water, air. You are anxious about the possibility of being threatened for these things. About the possibility of being extinguished. These are all extrapolations of the base, genetic drive that Richard Dawkins explored in The Selfish Gene.
These anxieties inform textual or narrative anxiety—a spillover of PoMo metanarrative, in that the cultural discourse that developed you, the Teppo-consciousness, was already anxious about them. Bringing the collision of existential- and narrative anxieties into direct, primary focus seems to be one of the most easily identifiable hallmarks of The Unnamed Weird these days.
Yes. Very weird. Very, very. As such, very worth our attention, in the narrative sense. This is Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (a book that I think should be required reading these days, from, like, sixth grade on) in action.
I’m actually quite partial to “The Unnamed Wierd” — as a name, I mean.
“Isn’t it weird that we’ve stopped asking ourselves what is beyond the limits of our imaginations? That we’ve given up on the fantastic possibility of the creative impulse.”
There’s nothing weird about this at all. If you check the Meyers-Briggs distribution of personality types, a large proportion of people are SJ, and would align with this worldview.
What’s strange is that we let the same banality overcome us in Fantasy and Sci Fi. I find this inexcusable (and yet I’m writing an epic fantasy as my first novel).
>> Bradley’s extension of “narrative anxiety.”
Yes, I meant something different. I’ll work up something a little more front-page than buried-in-comments. It’s not quite the Dawkins conception, and as I was writing this entry, I realized there’s a corresponding Maslow-ian footnote that I was blowing past. I would, as you know, lose track of my point if I stopped along the way.
You? Lose track of something? No.
Strangely, I’m thinking of a tiny little experimental hypertext project that, on delivery, was, shall we say, a bit larger?
You do realize that same explosion is probably going to happen again, don’t you?
There are always explosions. I just want to be shrapnel in someone’s heart.
But on the narrative anxiety- I agree, which is why the next word, the ontological weird tends to bring in stuff from horror (much like the new weird did, but with a different purpose) and terror and just makes people feel uncomfortable. it’s all about exploring anxiety, about pushing buttons, about making people uncomfortable and face that thing they keep sliding by.
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like the explosion has already happened, and we’re all already walking around shell-shocked and enshrapneled.
Healing is out of the question, even if there were a medic to call, so what do we do now? And what is this shrapnel doing to my heart, and therefore my circulatory system, and therefore my brain, and therefore …
I can’t speak for everyone here, but personally I like to kid myself that my fiction is about how to live in a broken world, in a world where meaning can only be guessed at, is fractured and shattered, is likely to not even exist.
For me the weird represents a way to translate the world and a way to cope with it. It’s the problem and the solution.
It’s not so much a case of healing, as a way of accepting, yes we are damaged, all of us, and yet we keep on moving.
“I like to kid myself that my fiction is about how to live in a broken world, in a world where meaning can only be guessed at, is fractured and shattered, is likely to not even exist.”
I like that a lot. I don’t know WHY I like it, but I think it’s good. I was going to post something saying that a lot of our writing seems to be characterized by an “assault on meaning” — but really, that’s just a pithy phrase. I don’t know if there’s an active assault on anything except the reader.
Most of the stories I’ve been reading dance around the edge of meaning and twist old symbols and archetypes in surprising ways, but the story doesn’t *mean* anything. Because it’s not supposed to mean anything. Because truth doesn’t mean anything. Because otherwise the writer is just Aesop.
For me, it’s about breaking away from the everyday gray — but not as an escape. Because if we’re trapped in this society, wouldn’t another society trap you as well? Isn’t that the point? To make you serve the needs of the whole organism, the species?
But this isn’t limited just to Next Weird. This is all over the place, isn’t it?
You’re right, this isn’t limited to Next Weird. But what we have going on is a certain approach to that issue/theme.
We all seem to come at this issue using 2 common elements that I can see:
1) A postmodern sensibility
2) We’ve been influenced by the genre-hopping, transgressive-horror-loving genre that is called New Weird.
Mieville’s particular flavor of new weird seems to me to especially lack the first of these criteria. He’s writing the big epic, with a limited bunch of people who achieve some fairly big change. I love it, by the way, but it’s not what I write.
Anyway…
I think those elements give us a certain take on the problems of living in a postmodern world. We use the weird, the transgressive, the horrific to address those problems.
Hmm. Perhaps this is obvious to everyone else, but could you define “a postmodern sensibility” for me?
[...] bookmarks tagged menial Another Angle on the Weird saved by 2 others kewlAkane bookmarked on 01/30/08 | [...]
?
You know. Post Modern.
Um. Wikipedia it.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand- yes, Mieville doesn’t use that sensibility- also, Mieville’s weird is rationalized in the context of secondary world logic.
Ours is not. I think that’s something we pull from more classic horror tradition- the unexplainable as being unexplainable. Or even better yet- no unexplainable at all, but just as a part of the very fabric of reality.
I think anxiety is the key to the next weird- and it’s caused by a delicate balance between complete assault on narrative forms and genre forms and reader accessibility.
What I mean by this is that unlike surrealist writers (well, people like Andre Breton and others) and dadaist writers we’re not completely destroying any narration or even anchor to the reader.
We are instead balancing between assault and anchor, between how the reader accesses the work and how the work becomes inaccessible. This dance is one built on the architecture of anxiety.
When the reader is anchored in and things become misty, distant, different, the reader will feel an anxiety. They will feel a sort of looseness in reality. This is portrayed further in the text by a loosening and a seeping/creeping of the Ultra Weird. This balance itself is the key to that anxiety- if you go over the edge too far and the work is a jumbled mess the reader no longer feels anxious, but instead bored or pissed off. If you move towards anchored reality too much the reader looses his anxiety.
“When the reader is anchored in and things become misty, distant, different, the reader will feel an anxiety.”
This sounds a lot like Lovecraft’s theory that using big words or words the reader is only familiar with in passing will increase the level of tension and help build atmosphere. And this did work for him, but there was a definite limit where it became detrimental or even silly. I personally like the “Color from Outer Space”, for instance, but that story doesn’t work for a lot of my friends.
I tried doing this in the first version of Teddy Bears, where the word was destroyed and there wasn’t any explanation. And one of the first things I heard was that people needed that explanation — even if it was only a very sketchy one. Of course, this may have occurred because the story was set after some strange apocalypse rather than being completely secondary. I know that a few people that are frustrated by the fact that Cormac McCarthy never described the apocalypse in “The Road”, for example.
I guess what I’m saying is that there is a fine line to walk to push the limits and still keep the reader engaged. And, as with the suddenness and speed of film editing, these limits will change over time as readers become accustomed to the new style.
In fact, I’d like to put this forward: symbols and common plot structures and even archetypes are all short-hand — they are the building blocks of meaning, and they are taught to us and trained into us by our culture. Any new movement that gains wide acceptance will broaden that short-hand, and it does so by both adding new ideas and by co-opting and subverting what already exists.
What I’m getting at is that the new needs something familiar in it. It can’t be completely alien, or it just doesn’t connect at all, and is ignored. But as a new art movement is established and widely accepted, the amount of familiarity needed goes down. Because the style of art from the movement is familiar on its own.
Dadaism was completely alien, heh.
Anyway, I’d have to disagree. On all points. If people want an explanation then that’s the anxiety at work. And that’s good.
Well, I will agree to disagree with you
But I believe there must be at least an ounce of Yang in the Yin and vice versa.