by uzwi
Weird is not a thing, it is a process. It is also an emergent product which somehow precedes every combination of events, genres & skills it can be said to emerge from. Good luck with planning to be weird, see you at the ceremony.
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the m john harrison blog 
Weird is inevitably messy. Clean it up, you’ve already lost.
So, basically, the weird that can be named is not the real weird. Lao Tzu would agree.
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OK, so I was just going to (oh so cutely) post the above and be done, but this got me thinking. Essentially, you’re using “the weird” as a deconstructive value, and this can be said of all deconstructive values (of which the Tao clearly is one, but so is “differance” — harking back to our discussion of Derrida and hauntology of a few months ago, Bataille’s “sovereignty” as an “operation,” etc etc). When “the weird” is “named” (hypostatized, reified, what have you) it becomes a metaphysical value and you get a stable “genre.” (A categorization and hierarchization of genres is always a metaphysical maneuver.) Just as, when the Tao is named, it stops undermining all metaphysical values because now it is such a value itself, and you get Taoism as a religion.
I’ll shut up now.
I wouldn’t risk putting it as articulately as that, in case the act in itself became a categorisation/hierarchization 😉
But I think I was stressing that it must have both qualities I mentioned, not just one. It must always be in the condition of preceding its own emergence. The intent to be weird produces genre; emergence alone produces surrealism (which I love but which is definitely not the same thing). The paradox, of course, being that while weird should always escape definition it never escapes recognition…
I mean, obviously, calling it anything is always your biggest mistake.
Does it never escape recognition? First thing that comes to mind is John Crowley’s “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines,” from Conjunctions 39. But also your own “The Ice Monkey.” It can also escape recognition by being allegorized into a psychological state or hallucination (many academic takes on “The Turn of the Screw”) or just into a parable of sorts (Borges).
Another parallel that comes to mind is (stop me, please! For the love of God, stop me!) punk. If it began as just a negative force, it quickly stabilized into a genre (let’s call it punk rock), and in order to actually survive it had to keep eluding recognition, by constantly changing its name, contaminating other genres. From what I could tell in “You Should Come with Me Now,” the weird had to stop being exclusively, or mainly, or at all, in the subject matter, and had to permeate the telling itself… The ghosts in YSCWMN are in the words, in the spaces between the letters. If it’s emerging, it’s emerging from those interstices, and if it doesn’t emerge from there, it doesn’t really emerge at all… But at that lowest level, it’s completely at risk of being misrecognized. Indeed, if it doesn’t fully run that risk, well — it just becomes genre.
Think of Isidore Ducasse. Where is the intent to be weird? Is it in the explicit subject matter of “Maldoror”? Is it in all those “beautiful as” similes, that plunge into the absurd (i.e. have no meaning beyond the surface of language), which made them so easily assimilable by Surrealism? Or is it simply in the syntax, in the playing with affirmation and negation in the text itself? Because that’s there fully in the “Poesies,” which are perhaps the weirdest of his work (they certainly are to me, by far), but which for decades were misrecognized as a rejection of his earlier work and a renewed classicism — because they had run the risk of misrecognition fully.
Sorry, I guess I didn’t actually shut up.
And yes, you’re totally right about this: “I wouldn’t risk putting it as articulately as that, in case the act in itself became a categorisation/hierarchization.” That caution is always in my mind when talking about such subjects. But if one is to say anything about them at all, one has to, you know, run that risk…
Or one can demonstrate it by writing “The Ice Monkey” or “the Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines” (which, I’ll admit, I’m still on the fence about whether it’s “weird” or “fantastic” at all; at times, I’m not sure it’s any different from your run-of-the-mill MFA program novella), or “Poesies.”
Hi Mike — I wrote two pretty long comments last night that haven’t shown up yet. Did they get lost by any chance? I wish I’d saved them. I was enjoying this exchange…
Hi Andrei
No problems—I was just doing a little writing. You said–
“From what I could tell in “You Should Come with Me Now,” the weird had to stop being exclusively, or mainly, or at all, in the subject matter, and had to permeate the telling itself… The ghosts in YSCWMN are in the words, in the spaces between the letters. If it’s emerging, it’s emerging from those interstices, and if it doesn’t emerge from there, it doesn’t really emerge at all…”
I have to be careful how I approach definitions like this. I’m used to people who think there can be a “transparent” prose & a distinct separation between the surface & the content—who don’t perhaps understand that the surface builds the illusion of depth and there is never in any architectural sense a “substance” to any act of writing. Writing is just some words and a cultural agreement between reader & writer to act as if the writer films something that isn’t there and passes the movie across.
So while I cautiously agree with everything you say here I’d also add that the prose structures which tell (or don’t quite tell) a story like “The Ice Monkey” refer to recognisable events in the world (“climbing” “a street” “looking after the child” “shouting”, etc), organising them so that the fine-grain disconnects between them imply somethng additional. An old technique, & one you can only associate with “content” rather than “style”. That’s where the weird shares its roots with the Gothic. I say “prose structures” because it’s not sufficient to say “words” or “sentences”; nor would it be sufficient to talk about all the components of a professional narratology, “time”, “character” etc. If you’re not using the whole of it, you’re not writing—you can’t use a story to haunt itself unless every component contexts (& thus haunts) every other component. You have to pretend that these really are “scenes” in which “characters” act against “settings” in “time”, because only then can you confuse the one for the other and (say, just as a single example) for a second or two have the characters be the setting & the setting be the character.
The same applies to uncertainties of tone and register—subtly shift the tone or the register without telling the reader you’ve done it, and their skin crawls with a sense that there’s something more to the text than it’s talking about. I’ve lived in the relations between implied narrator & register for fifty years. Many of the short pieces in YSCWMN fall into a different shape the moment the reader asks, “Where the *fuck* is the point of view here?” Or: “What *scale* are we at?”
None of this comes down simply to technique, or its perceived innate opposition to ”substance”. The fact is that, unless there is telepathy, there is only technique—only the words & the way they’re organised. Readers would perhaps prefer there not to be a writer. But there’s no message without a medium. At a certain age, my patience for arguments about that left me and I decided to be the kind of writer I am, and push my shopping expedition as far into the wasteland as it would go. So usually I try to avoid anything that might ignite the “Harrison’s lovely, but he’s just a stylist” issue. It saves everyone trouble. The weird might be a residue, but it’s quite carefully achieved.
I’d better go & do some writing. We shouldn’t encourage one another like this.