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A review by akemi_666
A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror by Jonathan Newell
3.0
Nice analysis exploring how the affect of disgust operates across Poe, Machen, Blackwood, Hodgson, and Lovecraft. Nowell argues that disgust (as mobilised by weird fiction writers) disrupts metaphysical notions of a divide between noumena and phenomena, self and other, human and nature, inside and outside. The monstrous — as contradiction, incompletion, reversion, amalgamation — breaks down categories and hierarchies of knowing. This is an experience both thrilling and terrifying — an unsettlement of the self.
It's interesting to see disgust as an emancipatory and critical force — as an inverted sublime that overwhelms the self unto dissolution, rather than reification. Newell posits the sublate against the sublime. Whereas the sublime arises out of a fear of the self's destruction (into nothingness) by a separate other, the sublate arises out of a disgust of the self's reduction (into non-humanness) by an entangled other.
This entanglement is interrogated across the early weird fiction writers. Poe's depictions of living death reveals the inseparability of decay and growth. Such representations aren't restricted to humans. Malevolence and corruption move through architectures, species, bodies and minds, blurring Cartesian boundaries, as well as Christian and liberal notions of agency as human-specific. Hodgson follows suit, depicting non-human agents, such as fungi, contaminating the white skin of settler Europeans — a reverse-colonialism by environments once believed to be passive and for the taking.
The book is a little repetitive. Sometimes the thesis statement (weird fiction writers utilise disgust to rupture dualistic metaphysics) feels a bit pre-empted — like Newell already knew what he wanted to say, then just found the appropriate examples to say it with. I've said this before, but Blackwood feels like an odd one out when it comes to weird fiction and negative affect. Many of his stories don't utilise disgust, but they are decidedly weird in ways that disturb our ability to comprehend the situations depicted. I think Lovecraft has had way too much influence in the study of weird fiction.
A lot of new materialist heavy hitters are referenced (Meillassoux, Thacker, Barad), along with some oldies (Shelling, Spinoza, Schopenhauer). It's okay. By throwing so many thinkers together, it can feel reductive at times. There's a lot of depth to these thinkers — a one or two page summary is not enough to capture their potency or relevancy for our catastrophic times.
It's interesting to see disgust as an emancipatory and critical force — as an inverted sublime that overwhelms the self unto dissolution, rather than reification. Newell posits the sublate against the sublime. Whereas the sublime arises out of a fear of the self's destruction (into nothingness) by a separate other, the sublate arises out of a disgust of the self's reduction (into non-humanness) by an entangled other.
This entanglement is interrogated across the early weird fiction writers. Poe's depictions of living death reveals the inseparability of decay and growth. Such representations aren't restricted to humans. Malevolence and corruption move through architectures, species, bodies and minds, blurring Cartesian boundaries, as well as Christian and liberal notions of agency as human-specific. Hodgson follows suit, depicting non-human agents, such as fungi, contaminating the white skin of settler Europeans — a reverse-colonialism by environments once believed to be passive and for the taking.
The book is a little repetitive. Sometimes the thesis statement (weird fiction writers utilise disgust to rupture dualistic metaphysics) feels a bit pre-empted — like Newell already knew what he wanted to say, then just found the appropriate examples to say it with. I've said this before, but Blackwood feels like an odd one out when it comes to weird fiction and negative affect. Many of his stories don't utilise disgust, but they are decidedly weird in ways that disturb our ability to comprehend the situations depicted. I think Lovecraft has had way too much influence in the study of weird fiction.
A lot of new materialist heavy hitters are referenced (Meillassoux, Thacker, Barad), along with some oldies (Shelling, Spinoza, Schopenhauer). It's okay. By throwing so many thinkers together, it can feel reductive at times. There's a lot of depth to these thinkers — a one or two page summary is not enough to capture their potency or relevancy for our catastrophic times.