Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Series Editor Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to refect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the signifcance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15002 Julius Greve · Florian Zappe Editors Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic

Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities Editors Julius Greve Florian Zappe Carl von Ossietzky University Georg-August-Universität Göttingen of Oldenburg Göttingen, Niedersachsen, Germany Oldenburg, Niedersachsen, Germany

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ISBN 978-3-030-28115-1 ISBN 978-3-030-28116-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28116-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword

Weird Geographies, Fantastic Maps Maps seem so commonplace and universal that their users often forget just how very weird they really are. Maps are certainly representational, yet they are so wildly fgural and metaphorical as to be utterly unrealistic, even as they are also associated with the most prosaic realisms of day- to-day existence. As a means of comprehending a given space, the map offers an entirely alternative epistemology in which the various features of that fgured space are registered, omitted, highlighted, or suppressed, and nothing on the map itself in any way replicates the “real” spaces and the elements within them. Contrary to popular understanding, maps do not depict the actual places that appear on their surfaces, but rather they involve elaborately allegorical structures by which the reader (or map- gazer) may attempt to make meaningful sense of these spaces. Maps are, by defnition, works of fantasy. This is, after all, part of their power. By presenting a practical and meaningful image of a space that is nevertheless completely fgurative, maps essentially entertain alternative realities by which to make sense of the real-world spaces and places. Speaking of literal maps in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously noted that “[t]he map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modifcation. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived as a work of

v vi FOREWORD art, constructed as a political action or as a mediation.”1 Such versatility accounts for the well nigh universal appeal of the map as a tool for ori- enting oneself in space, for navigating routes through space, and for rep- resenting territories at a helpfully abstract level—the “bird’s-eye view,” for example, beyond the subjective perception of any individual on the ground—not to mention the appeal of maps as aesthetic objects or works of art, partially or completely removed from the pragmatics of place and movement. In its wide variability of usage, popularity, infuence, and activity, the map fnds itself aligned well with other intrinsically multiva- lent social and artistic forms, such as literature, flms, and similar media. I have frequently endeavored to make connections between literature and mapping, combining the two in the term “literary cartography,” but also extending the literal and fgurative meanings of these ideas in such a way as to account for seemingly innumerable methods by which human beings make sense of or give form to their worlds and their situa- tions within them. I have argued that literature, along with other media, can function as a means by which to map the real-and-imagined spaces (as Edward Soja famously named them) of our societies, physical environ- ments, and conceptual domains, and that the subsequent maps become vehicles for achieving a sense of place in both space and time that in turn enables us to interpret, understand, and ultimately transform the worlds we inhabit and think.2 This literary cartography is grounded in acts of the imagination, and the underlying genre or discursive mode could thus rightly be labeled fantasy. I maintain that even the most putatively realistic works of literature, like the seemingly realistic but (upon further thought) obviously fgurative maps, are at their root essentially fantastic. The effec- tiveness of these imaginative endeavors may be measured in part by the widespread infuence and popularity of literature and other forms expressly categorized as fantasy, broadly conceived so as to include such genres as science fction, utopia, horror, and other fctions of alterity or estrangement. Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities, as a whole and in each of the essays it includes, registers the profound effects of such genre fction and media today. Signifcantly, editors Julius Greve and Florian Zappe have in this volume put together a sort of atlas or collection of maps by means of which readers may orient themselves with respect to the already weird and increasingly weirder geographies of our time, a moment character- ized by ecological, social, political, and representational crises so severe as to defy many of the traditional means of understanding them and of FOREWORD vii conceptualizing alternatives. As Fredric Jameson has famously put it (so famously, in fact, that there’s now a marvelously convoluted narrative of attribution attached to the statement), “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”3 The dominance within popular culture of narratives explicitly invoking radically alternative realities, from science fctional scenarios and superheroes to medi- evalist fantasies, myths, and fairy stories, might be taken as one sign of the contemporary yearning for radically different social formations that seem beyond the reckoning of more “realistic” modes of artistic expres- sion. Indeed, even the apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic dystopias that dominate mass culture today might be considered so many examples of a sort of utopian political unconscious at work, whereby a map of our real world that could engender alternative visions emerges from the tattered images of a destroyed environment.4 Similarly, as the essays in the present volume demonstrate convincingly, the reemergence of weird fction (broadly conceived) in recent years has opened up new vistas from which to view our own world and to imagine new ones. However, as ought to be clear from the foregoing, these fantastic maps cannot be taken for accurate representations of the weird geographies they attempt to lay out before us. The maps themselves are also weird, and the spaces depicted in them are likewise fantastic. If maps have always made possible a sort of clarifying overview, it is also the case that maps have served to confuse as much as to make known, and not just in their capacity as weapons of ideological warfare. Even rela- tively innocent maps can produce feelings of disorientation. As Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle have observed, “one of the frst products of a genuine striving for orientation is disorientation, as proximal coordinates come to be troubled by wide, and at times overwhelming vistas.”5 Along those lines, weird fction and fantasy can also prove disorienting at frst, but they often leave us with empowered imaginations, which in turn allow us to see this all-too-real world in altogether different ways, making possible new maps and making visible new spaces. The contributors to Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic provide exemplary visions of how these maps operate in culture today, and this volume as a whole allows us to identify those weird and fantastic features of the contemporary world system that, like the surreal or monstrous imagery of recent weird fction, could provide glimpses of other systems.

San Marcos, USA Robert T. Tally Jr. viii FOREWORD

Notes 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12. 2. See, e.g., my Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019); see also my Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013). 3. Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” in Ideologies of Theory (London: Verso, 2008), 573. Much earlier, Jameson had observed that “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination”; see Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xii. The notion has also been attributed to Slavoj Žižek, who in Mapping Ideology, had cited Jameson’s comment in making a similar point. As Sean Grattan has noted, “that the phrase circulates as a somehow unattributable truism says a lot about what kinds of futures might remain unthinkable after the much heralded end of history”; see Grattan, Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 5. 4. See, e.g., my “The End-of-the-World as World System,” in Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization, ed. Simon Ferdinand, Irene Villaescusa-Illán, and Esther Peeren (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 267–283. 5. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015), 25.

Bibliography Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Grattan, Sean. Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017. Jameson, Fredric. “Future City.” In Ideologies of Theory, 563–576. London: Verso, 2008. ———. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Tally Jr., Robert T. “The End-of-the-World as World System.” In Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization, edited by Simon Ferdinand, Irene Villaescusa-Illán, and Esther Peeren, 267–283. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. ———. Spatiality. London: Routledge, 2013. ———. Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Toscano, Alberto, and Jeff Kinkle. Cartographies of the Absolute. Winchester: Zero Books, 2015. Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the following individuals without whom the exploration of Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic would not have been possible: Robert T. Tally Jr., Allie Troyanos, Rachel Jacobe, Eugene Thacker, Keith Tilford, Marleen Knipping, Susann Köhler, James Dowthwaite, Andrew S. Gross, Anca-Raluca Radu, Theresa Croll, Frederik Prush, Caro Franke, Hanna Riggert, and Jonah H. Greve. Thank you for your input, inspiration, patience, and support! The text of Eugene Thacker’s chapter, “Naturhorror and the Weird,” has previously been published in his monograph Tentacles Longer Than Night: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3 (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2015), 143–156. The editors would like to thank John Hunt Publishing/Zero Books for generously granting permission to reprint these pages in the present book.

ix Contents

1 Introduction: Ecologies and Geographies of the Weird and the Fantastic 1 Julius Greve and Florian Zappe

2 Naturhorror and the Weird 13 Eugene Thacker

3 Uncanny New Worlds in Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “D’Outre Mort” and “The Black Bess” 25 Michaela Keck

4 The Weird and the Wild: Media Ecologies of the Outré-Normative 41 Julius Greve

5 Queering the Weird: Unnatural Participations and the Mucosal in H. P. Lovecraft and Occulture 57 Patricia MacCormack

6 Geological Insurrections: Politics of Planetary Weirding from China Miéville to N. K. Jemisin 73 Moritz Ingwersen

xi xii CONTENTS

7 “Indifference Would Be Such a Relief”: Race and Weird Geography in Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff’s Dialogues with H. P. Lovecraft 93 James Kneale

8 The Oceanic Weird, Wet Ontologies and Hydro-Criticism in China Miéville’s The Scar 111 Jolene Mathieson

9 “Through the Eyes of Area X”: (Dis)Locating Ecological Hope via New Weird Spatiality 129 Gry Ulstein

10 Inexistent Ink: Michael Cisco and Quentin Meillassoux on Writing Worlds 149 Ben Woodard

11 Notes on the Alluring Weirdness of (Materialist) Rumination and Regurgitation: Reading Ariana Reines and Jamie Stewart 165 Marius Henderson

12 Spaces of Communal Misery: The Weird Post-Capitalism of Beasts of the Southern Wild 183 Marlon Lieber

Notes on Contributors 201

Index 205