Conference: The Weird: Fugitive Fictions, Hybrid Genres, 2013

Abstract:

In Lovecraft’s later work (particularly ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ and ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’) the comfort of human space and environment is overwhelmed by a ‘realer’ weird landscape. This follows its own spatial and sensory schema, ones which shift the parameters and validity of human expression and comprehension. There is a horrible actuality to these weird intrusions that extends beyond materiality into mirages, dreams, and even memories, deranging the human perception of reality and transforming the individual. This process wherein landscape produces authorial propositions on reality resonates strikingly with the model of speculative writing delineated by Samuel Delany. The points of conflict between the two reveal wider insights into Lovecraft’s work: whereas Delany sees speculative landscapes as a route to expanding the range of language and expression, in Lovecraft the weird performs the opposite, contracting the comprehensible into ‘the unnameable’. This allows us to cast aside criticisms of Lovecraft’s supposedly repetitive style, and illuminates the cohesive antirational system spanning his later writings. Although he is acknowledged as an influence on science fiction, contemporary Lovecraft study favours reading connections between his work and a wider weird tradition, and to a lesser extent exploring its tensions and affinities with Modernism. The thesis encourages an understanding of Lovecraft’s weird beyond current study, as resonating with concerns of literature beyond Modernism, and even exceeding some of them. This study could also be extended within the weird tradition (Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’) as well as to speculative writers outside of it (Philip Dick, J.G. Ballard, and William Burroughs).