Perverted by Language: Weird Fiction and the Semiotic Anomalies of a Genre
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Perverted by Language: Weird Fiction and the Semiotic Anomalies of a Genre By Alessandro Sheedy BA (Hons) Tasmania Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Tasmania December 2016 Declaration of Originality This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or a diploma by the University or any other institution, except by way of background information and duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of my knowledge and belief no material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of the thesis, nor does the thesis contain any material that infringes copyright. Signed, Alessandro Sheedy Authority of Access This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying and communication in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968. Signed, Alessandro Sheedy ii Abstract: Perverted by Language is a genre study of weird fiction, from the golden age of the High Weird to the New Weird of today. The study specifically addresses the often-overlooked tendency of weird fiction narratives to adopt a self-theorising approach to language, text, and discourse. While speculative fiction criticism has typically focussed on the teratology of the weird––the formless, yet over-formed monstrosities described by writer China Miéville as the prototypical “eldritch, oozing, tentacled thing”––my thesis argues that weird fiction’s monsters are as much semiotic as they are morphological. The horror of weird fiction, and its representations of monstrosity, frequently takes the form of utterance, spoken question and written confession. Perverted by Language focuses exclusively on the weird’s most privileged form, the short story, analysing the work of writers including Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco, and Caitlin R. Kiernan. My thesis also examines stories by postmodern writers of the fantastic, such as Jorge Luis Borges, whose writings occasionally explore weird semiotic territory. The project draws on the work of theorists who, like the fiction writers listed above, en-weird language and the world of its usage. A key objective of the study is therefore to read with the grain of the weird rather than against it. Major influences include the spectral idioms of Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, the speech acts and performatives of J. L. Austin, and the non-linear, menacingly circling dialects associated with Brian Massumi’s concept of threat affect. Chapter One assesses the attitudes and worldview of the weird as both a genre and a mode of writing, defining the field via an evaluation of differing critical approaches. Chapter Two examines the prototypical speech act in weird fiction, what I have termed “naming the unnameable.” Surveying stories that deploy this mode of negative performativity in various ways, the chapter elucidates a weird grammar of nameless things and thingless names. Chapters Three and Four form a two-chapter arc on the subject of the library, as both site and discourse, in weird fiction. Chapter Three looks at the library according to Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the literary chronotope, arguing that weird fiction’s library is its most characteristic narrative time-space. Chapter Four examines the library’s function in the weird according to Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, as a space whose normative discourses are monstrously undermined by the texts on its shelves. Chapters Five and Six discuss weird affect and grammars of affect. Chapter Five deals with the affinity between weird fiction’s brand of affect and hauntology, arguing that both rely on the spectralising of language to be iii adequately conveyed. Finally, Chapter Six analyses a specific kind of affective process in the weird: namely, threat, and the manner in which threat is performed in language. The chapter contends that threat affect in the weird shares a homologous relationship with the speech act of the promise, deferring itself threateningly in language without revealing its true form. Throughout, my overarching argument is that weird fiction fixates on the lacunae of language in order to elucidate a crisis of representation afflicting the extra-diegetic world. The weird’s narratology of horror is informed by language’s failure to adequately support human narratives of world and reality. However, the weird dramatises linguistic failure and negative representation to construct its own counter-narratives. Its stories depict humans as victims of language’s unfathomable spirals, and a world forever on the brink of an apocalypse of signification. iv Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge and extend heartfelt thanks to my supervisors, Dr Lisa Fletcher and Dr Hannah Stark, for their unerring support and enthusiasm for my project. Their insightful and erudite feedback has been invaluable throughout. I would also like to thank the following people, who in one form or another have helped this project come to fruition: Bronte Anderson, Piper Black, Dr Yvette Blackwood, Ryan Burley, Claire Calver, Simon Chapman, Adriano Cortese, Mary Cortese, Professor Ralph Crane, Misha Hardwick, Donna Hollis, Timothy J. Jarvis (whose stellar The Wanderer proved once again that the weird novel remains a viable form), Associate Professor Anna Johnson, Dr Dani Kirby, Priya Kitchener, Dr Elizabeth Leane, Mordred Le Faye, Dr Dominic Lennard, Roen Meijers, Patrick Moffat, Graeme Pearce (the world’s greatest creative writing teacher), Kim Pearce, Sophie Pilkington, Luke Robinson, Sylvia Sheedy, Lucinda Strahan, and James Tyson. Thank you to my beautiful partner Leila Mihal and her gorgeous son Yuuki for putting up with my occasional crankiness and anxiety in the months leading up to submission. It’s all about you now! And lastly, thanks to my wonderful mother Belinda Sheedy, who has been the single biggest source of help and support over the fraught five years of this project’s duration. I love you and I can never repay you adequately for the time you’ve taken to patiently read through all of my convoluted drafts. v Contents: The “Struggle to Name”: A Weird Introduction…………………………………………1 Chapter 1: Weirding the World, Defining the Field………………………………..14 1. Theoretical or Anti-Theoretical: A Critique of S. T. Joshi……………..........................15 2. Against the World, Against Narrative: Contemporary Approaches to the Weird……...23 3. The Riddle of the World: The Weird as Mode and as Genre…………………………..34 4. “The Edge and Not the Centre”: Towards an Ethics of the Weird……………………..42 Chapter 2: The Weird Speech Act: A Möbian Performative……………………….46 1. Rosemary Jackson and “Non-signification” in Lovecraft………………………………49 2. Perceiving the Unnameable: Ineffability……………………………………………….51 3. Perceiving the Unnameable: Sublimity…………………………………………………60 4. Performing the Unnameable: J. L. Austin and the “Self-stultifying” Speech Act……....67 5. Locutionary Enigmas: Critiquing Austin……………………………………………….72 6. The Unnameable and Periperformativity……………………………………………….78 7. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………....82 Chapter 3: The Reading Room at the End of the Universe: The Library as Weird Chronotope………………………….....................84 1. “Malevolent Demiurgi”: “The Library of Babel”………………………………………94 2. The Library as Hollow Earth: “A Contaminated Text”………………………...............103 3. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..............110 Chapter 4: Monsters of Discourse: The Weird Library as Heterotopia…………….112 1. Foucault’s Heterotopia………………………………………………………………….113 2. The Heterotopia as Magic Circle……………………………………………………….121 3. The Shadow Out of Discourse………………………………………………………….126 4. The Nonhuman Archive………………………………………………………………...137 5. Archival Repetition and the Inhuman-ness of Language……………………………….141 6. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………149 Chapter 5: Shadows and Portents: Affect and Hauntology………………………….151 1. Weird vs. Hauntology: The Binarism of China Miéville………………………………..158 2. Spectral Subjects: H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider”……………………………………168 3. Spectral Geographies: Thomas Ligotti’s “The Red Tower”…………………………….178 4. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….187 Chapter 6: “Who Knows the End?”: Affect, Threat, and Performativity....................189 1. The Performativity of Threat in Weird Fiction………………………………………….192 2. The Call of the Shadow………………………………………………………………….196 3. Cthulhu as Parable……………………………………………………………………….206 4. “This is where I stand”: Learning to Live with Threat in Caitlin R. Kiernan’s “Andromeda Among the Stones....211 5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….223 “Transfixed in the Order of the Unreal”: A Weird Conclusion………………………….226 Works Cited List……………………………………………………………….................239 vi vii The “Struggle to Name”: A Weird Introduction In 2011, a discussion thread was started on The Nightmare Network––the official online forum for weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti––entitled “Recommendations for weird fiction.” Bristling with the obsessive zeal accompanying any new enterprise, the author of the thread, symbolique, requested reading suggestions for weird fiction from fellow members of the forum. The request was clearly a sound one, given that many writers thought of as contemporary masters of weird fiction––including, but not limited to, Mark Samuels, Matt Cardin, Simon Strantzas, Richard Gavin, Joel Lane, Quentin S. Crisp, D. F. Lewis, and Wilum “Hopfrog” Pugmire––were at the time active contributors to the forum. However, when a writer––Strantzas, as it happened––finally did take the time to