The weird and the eerie

Mark Fisher (2016)

• Introduction:
  • The Weird and the Eerie (Beyond the Unheimlich)
    • uncanny: repetition and doubling
    • Freud's unheimlich is about the strange within the familiar, the strangely familar, the familiar as strange - about the way in which the domestic world does not coincide with itself.
    • The weird and the eerie make the opposite move: they allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside. As we shall see, the weird is that which does not belong.
    • the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?
    • The soothsaying witches in Macbeth, after all, are known as the Weird Sisters, and one of the archaic meanings of "weird" is "fate". The concept of fate is weird in that it implies twisted forms of time and causality that are alien to ordinary perception, but it is also eerie in that it raises questions about agency: who or what is the entity that has woven fate?
    • This sense of wrongness associated with the weird - the conviction that this does not belong - is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new.
    • The eerie also entails a disengagement from our current attachments. But, with the eeire, this disengagement does not have the quality of shock.
• The Weird:
  • The Out of Place and the Out of Time: Lovecraft and the Weird
    • the very generic recognisability of creatures such as vampires and werewolves disqualifies them from provoking any sensation of weirdness
    • "Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large," Lovecraft wrote to the publisher of the magazine Weird Tales in 1927.
    • "To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all." It is this quality of "real externality" that is crucial to the weird.
    • Lovecraft's work seldom evokes a feeling of horror.
    • Accordingly, it is not horror but fascination - albeit a fascination usually mixed with a certain trepidation - that is integral to Lovecraft's rendition of the weird.
    • The weird cannot only repel, it must also compel our attention.
    • Fantasy is set in worlds that are entirely different from ours.
    • no discernable charge of the weird in stories such as the Narnia books
    • we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold
    • Lovecraft instantiates what Borges only "fabulates"
    • Imagine if Lovecraft had actually produced a full text of the Necronomicon; the book would seem far less real than it does when we only see citations. Lovecraft seemed to have understood the power of the citation, the way in which a text seems more real if it is cited than if is encountered in the raw.
  • The Weird Against the Worldy: H.G. Wells
    • thresholds between worlds
    • between is crutial to the weird
    • In Lovecraft's tales, any insanity the characters experience is a consequence of the transcendental shock that the encounter with the outside produces; there is no question of the insanity causing characters to preceive the entities.
    • Lovecraft's real antipathy was to the worldly..
    • the way in which desire perpetuates itself by always missing its offical object of satisfaction
  • "Body a tentacle mess": The Grotesque and The Weird: The Fall
    • grotesque: co-presence of the laughable and that which is not compatible with the laughable
    • The songs on Grotesque are tales, but tales half-told. The words are framentary, as if they have come to us via an unreliable transmission that keeps cutting out.
    • We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natual order and is capable of re-combining nature's products into hideous new forms.
  • Caught in the Coils of Ouroboros: Tim Powers
    • "an internal constituent of the so-called 'objective' process itself: only through this additional detour does the past itself, the 'objective' state of things, become retroactively what it always was"
    • subjectivity as such presupposes the illusion that things could be different
  • Simulations and Unworlding: Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Philip K. Dick
    • cognitive estrangement
    • nostalgia for the present
    • "The misery of happiness, of Marcuse's false happiness, the gratifications of the new car, the TV dinner and your favourite programme on the sofa - which are now themselves secretly a misery, an unhappiness that doesn't know its name, that has no way of telling itself apart from genuine satisfaction and fulfilment since it has presumably never encountered this last."
    • The houses became fewer. The truck passed gas stations, tawdry cafes, ice cream stands and motels. The dreary parade of motels...as if, Ragle thought, we had already gone a thousand miles and were just now entering a stange town. Nothing is so alien, so bleak and unfriendly, as the strip of gas stations - cut-rate gas stations - and motels at the edge of your own city. You fail to recognise it. And, at the same time, you have to grasp it to your bosom. Not just for one night, but for as long as you intend to live where you live. But we don't intend to live here any more. We're leaving. For good.
  • Curtains and Holes: David Lynch
    • Dreams are not only spaces of solipsistic interiority: they are also a terrain in which the "red curtains" to the outside can open up.
    • a dreaming without a dreamer (as all dreams really are, since the unconscious is not a subject)
• The Eerie:
  • Approaching the Eerie
    • the weird is constituted by a presence. the eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence
    • The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something.
    • A bird's cry is eerie if there is a feeling that there is something more in (or behind) the cry than a mere animal reflex or biological mechanism
    • the eerie and problems of agency
  • Something Where There Should Be Nothing: Nothing Where There Should Be Something: Daphne du Maurier and Christopher Priest
    • "During these three days, I must have been alert, conscious and self-aware, feeling the continuity of memory, sure of my identity and existence. An event that followed them, though, eradicated them, just as one day death would erase all memory. It was my first experience of a kind of death, and, since the, although unconscious itself was not to be feared, I saw memory as the key to sentience. I existed as long as I remembered."
    • the conumdrum of how it is possible to conceal something from ourselves
    • But who is the author of these stories?
    • Whereas amnesia generates a gap that is perceived and felt - a gap that demands filling by a story; disappearance is a gap which conceals itself.
    • Not seeing what is there..
  • On Vanishing Land: M.R. James and Eno
  • Eerie Thanatos: Nigel Kneale and Alan Garner
    • eerie graffiti: "not really now not any more"
  • Inside Out: Outside In: Margaret Atwood and Johnathan Glazer
    • The I which speaks and the I which is spoken..
    • determinate features (height, age, weight, etc.) can only be attributed to the I which is spoken of
    • this I which speaks: lacking in positive physical predicates
  • Alien Traces: Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Christopher Nolan
    • The immediate temptation here is to dismiss this as nothing more than kitsch sentimentality. Part of the power of Interstellar, however, comes from its readiness to risk appearing naive, as well as emotionally and conceptually excessive. And what the film opens up here is the possibility of an eerie love. Love moves from being on the side of the seemingly (over)familiar to the side of the unknown. On Brand's account, love is unknown but something that can be investigated and quantified: it becomes an eerie agent.
  • "...The Eeriness Remains": Joan Lindsay

Page last revised on: 2024-02-23