MARK FISHER’S ‘THE WEIRD & THE EERIE’

The latest in a series of not-a-proper-review-at-all

Beyond beyond

Some seven years after I last looked into a Mark Fisher book, and two years after he actually wrote ’The Weird and the Eerie’, I am yet again confirming my status as the internet's latecomer. But it’s okay because I am, I confess upfront, using Fisher’s book as a jumping-off point rather than offering a ‘proper’ review.

Fisher’s method is to explore the distinctions between the Weird and the Eerie through a series of examples. For convenience’s sake, let’s assume they’re both subsections (or, in Fisher’s terminology, ‘modes’) of the Uncanny.

If I were to reduce the Weird to a phrase it would the one used in the invocation of a genie in ’The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’ (1958) - “from the land beyond beyond”. Or if an image, there’s a Doctor Strange panel I remember as a child, where the dread Dormammu was literally tearing his way into our reality. It wasn’t the sky which he ripped apart, which wouldn’t be so different to an arriving alien fleet, it was everything - air, earth, matter, the entire scene. He had been outside of our reality, and now here he was stepping inside it.

Except there’s two problems here. First, I… sotto voice… completely failed to find that image anywhere. (There’s a vaguely similar one above.) Second, there’s a central element to the Weird it leaves implicit. If there’s always the rip, the threshold torn open between dimensions, it has a paradoxical purpose. It disrupts out reality, but it exposes us to a higher reality. It’s impossible but also inevitable.

Imagine a child at night, sensing some monstrous creature in his room and pulling the covers over his head. A sheet will be no protection from such a beast, but in that moment the gesture makes him feel better. Now imagine a bigger sheet, a shared one we have wrapped right round ourselves, one generation after generation have lived their lives under. We’ve even written reassuring-sounding explanations upon it that there can be no such thing as monsters, not in this world. And we have explored from one end of that sheet to the other. It’s worked quite well, we’ve become our own reassuring parent to our own troubled child, singing ourselves to sleep.

But it’s never really worked. When we encounter the Weird we’re struck by dread. But also resignation. Like the child, in our hearts we knew… we always knew that sheet was only there to make us temporarily feel better. As Fisher says: “The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.”

And it’s this combination that counts - the threshold, and the sense that the Weird however arresting or unexpected is not wrong. Fisher starts his book with Lovecraft, clearly the exemplifier of the Weird par excellence, but then moves onto something which looks and feels very different - the HG Wells story ’The Door in the Wall.’

This door leads to quite a different world to Lovecraft’s dark and destructive forces. This time there’s an idyllic garden making up an idealised world, where pictures in a book are not of things but the things themselves. (A language where, in Semiotic terms, the signifier is not separate from the signified, is often used as a metaphor for the absence of alienation. Language simply connects us to things, rather than abstracting them from us.) It’s the difference between the mundane and the experiential, between being alive and living.

But can these two really be filed together, Lovecraft’s malevolent nether worlds and Wells’ bucolic paradise? Or is Fisher simply shoving together anything outside the narrow norms of social realism? (The widespread assumption there’s Proper Writing and That Other Thing.) The short answer is yes they can, and Fisher is smartly using his first two examples to mark out the parameters of the Weird.

But for the story to have any impact we need to feel two things - that this strange world is the world, that it’s us who have somehow stumbled into the wrong place, and now our task is to get back. And readers must recognise the place, not just as a literary trope, but (perhaps in a less literal sense) in themselves. They must feel the protagonist’s sense (“this place is inexplicably strange to me, and yet I know I belong here”), while knowing from the outset they’re only ever going to get glimpses of that world.

In fact it’s quite similar to Van Morrison’s song ’Madame George’, the only significant difference being Morrison reflects on an Arcadian time rather than a place. If Wells’ tale is summed up by the door that sometimes opens, with Morrison it’s one that definitely closes. Morrison needs no Weird motifs because his song is about memory, his place is somewhere he can see but not access.

It’s We Who Are Outside

And if the Weird is dependent on a juxtaposition, with the Eerie it’s a disjunction. (Fisher describes it as “constituted by a failure of absence or a failure of presence”.) So with our default Eerie example, Paul Nash’s ‘The Shore’ (1923, above), this time its effect is drawn precisely from its depiction being so consistent. 

There’s nothing you could point out as unfamiliar. Yet this isn’t the charming English seaside we feel we could step into, warm sand between our toes. In fact, if there is a thing that doesn’t fit here, it’s us. There’s the sense that even if this wasn’t a painting, even if the scene was really there in front of us, we’d be just as distanced from it. If conveys a feeling of alienation close to exile.

Except, again, there’s a deficiency in using this as our identifying image. With the Weird’s insistence on an incongruous presence, there’s a natural tendency to focus on one half of the Eerie, to see it as all about haunting absence, the withholding of something. (Fisher uses the metaphor of the curtain you can’t pull back.) But that would be too limited. The Eerie’s not the opposite of the Weird, their relationship is more like siblings. Nash himself often painted Eerie presence he found in his home landscape. This is what I said after his recent Tate Britain retrospective:

“When you come across a megalith or longbarrow on the landscape it just calmly sits there, seeing no reason to explain itself. It can even seem as though it's you who is the interloper. And it's mystery seems magnified by it's misshapenness. Classical columns seem to manifest the universal rules of geometry, just as they're connected to a language we can decipher. And so their strangeness becomes in itself strange to us. This should be our home turf, the most recognisable thing, and yet it’s impervious to our understanding.

”Inevitably we come to see these things as outside ourselves, a puzzle to be solved with measuring tape and aerial photographs. Yet there's the nagging sense the answer is within us, one of those things we seem to know but cannot quite recall.”

"The Thing Overwhelms"

Fisher refers to dictionary definitions of both words but only in passing, seeing them as perfunctory and inadequate. His insistence on the term ‘modes’ may be because he’s keen on opening up broad categories, rather than proscribing rigid systems. (He specifically rejects ‘genres’.) And it would be strange in itself to build rigid parameters around such a term, when even the casual use of “weird” has connotations of inexplicability.

And his counsel is wise because this reductive reaction is retained in us, the fans of these genres. Even as we reach towards the Uncanny we’re predisposed to try and explain it away. Fisher is always cautioning us against rushing to explanations, but he’s at his most pointed over Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’:

“…we are compelled to treat it as a solvable enigma, to overlook its ‘wrongness’, its intractability, in the same way that, in Club Silencio, we are compelled to overlook the illusory nature of the performances.”

Or, as he says elsewhere over Lovecraft:

“The Thing overwhelms, it cannot be contained, but its fascinates.”

All those YouTube videos which glibly promise some film or other will be ‘explained’ in less than ten minutes… They’re presumably made by fans of the Uncanny, or at the very least by people who paid for their own cinema tickets. But ironically they become the equivalent to that stock film character who insists there must be a ”rational” (ie banal) explanation. The one whose killjoy insistence usually gets him killed.

We go to see a film like ‘Mulholland Drive’ precisely because we want to experience the Uncanny, but once that’s taste’s on our tongue we immediately try to counteract it with something more bland. We’re like the fool who goes looking for a fight, but as soon as it starts shies away. We don’t want to get what we want, we just want to want it. Worse, sometimes the work itself comes audience-ready, created just to be “explained”, in which case there was never anything Uncanny there to be begin with. (I’ve not seen the film Jack Graham reviews here, but his comments ring true in general.)

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with theorising from films. Fisher himself does this continually. And, for example, his reading of the ending of ‘Under The Skin’, with it’s reflection on varying notions of the self, is compelling. But theorising is a different creature to explaining, just as to explore is not to delineate. We have the phrase “explain away”. No-one has ever theorised anything away.

New Times, New Monsters

But the real problem with dictionary definitions is that they’re concerned with etymology. They don’t necessarily find the meaning of a word in it’s origins, but they assume there’s some core concept which has been retained over time, even if it’s outer form has changed.

The Weird’s original definition (usually, if inadequately, reduced to fate) implied not a thing outside our world but a thread that ran through all worlds. (Ironically, Alan Garner, who Fisher files with the Eerie, exemplifies this original conception of the term quite closely.) Whereas in the sense Fisher uses them, they’re not even recent concepts so much as modern, even if they appropriate old words. All his examples are Twentieth century or later.

All the time people believed in the literal existence of Heaven and Hell (themselves adaptations of the original Upperworld and Underworld visited by shamans) any conception of the Weird as we use it now was held at bay. Both places might be fantastical in nature but they were places, connected to our world. They could be visited, and they were, by Dante and others. (‘The Divine Comedy’ is not intended to be taken as a true account, but it is structured as a travelogue.)

In short, we need the explored world in order to have the beyond. It’s the sheet we hold up before us. The Weird is dependent upon the supposition that all is delineated, in order to violate it. The Eerie is dependent upon the supposition that all is known, in order to upend it. The “eerie cry” of the bird (a common dictionary example picked up by Fisher) works because we have ornithology, our studies should by now have given us an understanding of birds’ actions.

But space counts as much as time. In my examples above, the first my mind went to, the Weird is American and the Eerie British. And of Fisher’s seven weird examples, four are from America. Whereas of his twelve examples of the Eerie, nine are European. And he stresses how Daphne du Maurier’s original novel ‘The Birds’ differed from the later film. (“Instead of a sunlit Californian setting, we find ourselves in a grey and tempestuous Cornwall”.) And, anecdotal evidence only, but I think my own preference is for the Eerie.

(The tricky cases are the Canadian Margaret Atwood and the Australian Joan Lindsay. The latter’s ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ has Australian characters but what the story is about is displaced Europeans, clinging to old customs in the new and unfamiliar landscape.)

ST Joshi suggests that the greater dominance of Puritanism in American culture led to social realism becoming the primary literary mode. It’s not just that fantastical literature is seen as silly or juvenile, social realism is held to be morally instructive – the stuff that’s good for you. So in America fantastical fiction in general was most marginalised - into pulp magazines. But, at least in part, Weird fiction needs that repression and marginalisation. Fisher recounts how Lovecraft and Lindsay don’t reject social realism so much as utilise it in order to subvert it. But there’s a wider point. There’s no return of the repressed without the repression.

Fisher refers to the human-as-scale device: ”Lovecraft needs the human world, for much the same reason that a painter of a vast edifice might insert a standard human figure standing before it: to provide a sense of scale.” And of course that’s a common Romantic motif, used to convey the Sublime. And if the Uncanny is modern, then the art movement Modernism drew a surprising amount from Romanticism.

Formally, the distinction is clear cut. The Romantic concerns itself with the natural world, whereas the Weird is always about the outside and beyond. But in practice things are slipperier. In Romanticism nature very often is depicted as outside - the forest outside the village, the mountain beyond the town and so on. Moreover, its depiction of nature often borders on the animist, nature is seen as having a presence. More importantly, as mentioned earlier, the arrival of the Weird is seen as inexorable - we always knew it would end like this. And this is the real connection. Like Nature in the Sublime, it’s where we really belong, even if it destroys us.

Hence, while Nash was a Modernist artist, associating with Surrealism, he also had a post-Romantic fascination for the English landscape. And the animism of objects, in both Kneale and Garner, is clearly indebted to the Romantic.

And (to use another of Fisher’s examples) Tarkovsky’s ’Solaris’ is virtually pantheistic. The titular planet isn’t just sentient but inscrutable, as much so as any God. It’s there to tell humans things about themselves, even if they have trouble deciphering it’s mysterious ways. Perhaps, symbolically speaking, it is the Earth. The humans observe it from their satellite, through their instruments and devices, having (as one character puts it) “lost our sense of the cosmic. The ancients understood it perfectly.”

So the Weird is in many ways an upping of the ante on the Sublime. But that upping is important. Fisher describes the Weird as “exorbitant,” which seems a stronger word than “more”. Sometimes a difference can becomes so quantitive that it tips over into qualitative. Turner’s sea storms look like they could smash you to pieces, even if you think you’re clever. But Cthulhu can obliterate your mind simply by showing up.

Are Alternative Facts Uncanny?

And if the Uncanny is associated with the modern, Fisher’s book may even be timely for its importance may be increasing. The dystopia of a film like ‘THX 1138’, - where everything is in order and that’s precisely the problem, all so right it’s wrong - now seems like yesterday’s problem.

And the face of the resurgent far right, somewhat less aesthetic than Dr. Strange or Paul Nash, is of course Donald Trump. Of course the Orange Aboherrence himself is not even a boorish Cthulhu, his bozo inarticulacy and tiny grasping hands are merely a synecdoche of the banality of evil. (And we should never forget his victory was brought about through the American political system, rather than the American electorate.) But he still spearheads something.

And that something isn’t dystopian, at least not in the strict sense of an anti-utopia. Trump and his “good people” seem to have no plan beyond sewing disorder that will hopefully hit their enemies harder than them. That’s why Mark Hamill reading Trump’s tweets in his Joker voice worked so well, he’s more devil clown than despot.

In my recent piece on the Tate’s exhibition of Russian Revolutionary prints, to describe the first failed Revolution of 1905 I used Gramsci’s quote “now is the time of monsters”. And it often feels like we are living through another time of monsters. Though our times would better be described by Goya’s “the sleep of reason produces monsters”. The unnatural (zombie outbreaks and other apocalyptic events) seems the natural way for us to describe our era to ourselves. We distract ourselves from our impending destruction by watching big, spectacular movies which show us our destruction, and we even comment on it to ourselves as we do it.

That old internet quandary, of how to debate against weaponised stupidity, now seems all-prevalent. In fact reason can seem to be the wrong implement in analysing what’s going on in the world today, which is so manifestly devoid of reason. It would be like trying to analyse water by pinning it down. You literally can’t make sense of the far right because it doesn’t, it’s incoherent to it’s core. Whereas to see it through the prism of the Uncanny, that might prove more helpful.

Let’s try to find an example. In an earlier piece on the history of Science Fiction I focused on the image of the skeleton in the space suit, which in retrospect I interpreted too narrowly. I was thinking of some cross between Cronos devouring his own offspring and a parasite hollowing out its host from within - so what we end up with is a skeleton where there should be an adventurous astronaut.

And what we see may well be the Gothic wearing the skin of Science Fiction. But that skin is still important! Even in that image, the space suit is still integral. On the outside is not the same as marginal.

The far right, will often straight-out mock rationalism in it’s foes. Smart people, they’re not real people. (As in Michael Gove’s infamous phrase “people have had enough of experts.”) And the basis of its appeal of course lies in offering an ersatz sense of belonging, which is at the very least orthogonal to an appeal to reason. 

But, despite its frequent appeals to history (of course nothing more than hanging up fake heraldry), it’s a modern phenomenon. So, while always feeling free to contradict itself, it will often affect rationalism. It’s fundamentally irrational, but not formally anti-rational. Just as the far right venerates order while practising disorder, it venerates rationalism while speaking in gibberish.

This allows its adherents the luxury of succumbing to their basest instincts while maintaining a veneer of reason. You can indulge your heart (or perhaps more accurately your spleen), while pretending to keep your head. This is why we have ”alternative facts’”, which are in essence facts still clung to even after they’ve been proven false, because they only ever had to look like facts. (It’s not a coincidence that alt.right leaders are almost entirely very stupid people very convinced they’re very smart.)

And if I say there’s some parallel between the skeleton in a spacesuit and the alt.right’s pseudo-rationalism, I’m not claiming the image to be far right in itself, nor it to be a critique of the far right. It’s highly unlikely any of this entered the head of its creator. I’m just saying it’s zeitgeisty, a cultural barometer, and it had to be because it composed itself out of ingredients it found around itself. Consequently, it can be made into a way of framing something which might be useful to us.