The New Weird (48 page)

City.
These elements mirror an aesthetic that can be found in Mervyn Peake's first two
Gormenghast
novels.novels that had a particular preoccupation with cultural issues like the monolithic burden of tradition, and the essence of authority.

Indeed, the grotesquerie in these texts seems to be related to the texts' socio-political milieu. More specifically, it seems in some cases to focus upon the corporeality ― the very bodies ― of the characters. The Remade of the Bas-Lag novels, the dwarf-manta ray from
City of Saints,
the immortal and multiform Eszai and dreamlike animal denizens of the drug-induced Shift in
The Year of Our War,
Gwynn as a basilisk and Beth as a sphinx in
The Etched City.

The question arises, why is grotesquerie such a prominent element in these texts, and why is there a proliferation of these characters with strange bodily forms? Speculative fiction is replete with weird corporealities, of course ― ghosts, aliens, cyborgs, monsters of all sorts ― and probably all of them could be seen as "weird." But in New Weird texts, characters' bodies appear in a grotesque mode ― and this changes the way we respond to them. We can't read those grotesque bodies in the same way as we do bodies that register as "normal."

What is the grotesque? For one thing, it's an aesthetic register that unsettles. Consider gargoyles, Medusa, Frankenstein's monster, the alien in the movies of the same name. The out-and-out blood and guts of some kind of splatter-oriented horror suggests anxiety about or the attempt to come to grips with death. But the grotesque points to something else entirely, something more subtle. It's an unease that suggests our way of classifying the world into knowable parts doesn't get the job done; it is, ultimately,
confusion,
because the different parts of something don't make sense together (Harpham xv). The grotesque demonstrates that there are things for which we do not have categories, and, therefore, that our ways of making meaning are artificial.

If the grotesque is part of the New Weird's overall aesthetic, how does it inflect or affect the stories' content? The grotesque in these texts seems to be inviting a particular reading of the texts' events, characters, or socio-political backdrop (depending on the text). Many are set in urban spaces populated by physically weird, aesthetically grotesque characters. These two elements ― bodies and cities ― play a dominant roll in the stories' symbolic or visual vocabulary. In fact, many of the stories themselves establish a connection between bodies and cities: in
Iron Council,
the Remade had to get out of New Crobuzon to found a city where they could live free of tyranny; Dvorak the dwarf is tattooed with an image of Ambergris, and later becomes a manta-ray that somehow
is
the city, come to reclaim the man called X, in
City of Saints;
images of Gwynn's body torn asunder populate Beth's artwork more and more as Gwynn's role in promoting slavery in Ashamoil increases; and in
The Year of Our War,
the city of Epsilon can be accessed only through death or a hallucinogenic drug, and is the origin of the Insects that terrorize the Fourlands. Broadly speaking, within the symbolic vocabulary of the texts, cities seem to stand for the overarching power or social structure, and a reading ― often a critique ― of those structures can be seen in the grotesquerie of the characters' corporeality. Whether power structures are tyrannical, totalitarian, corrupt, godless ― these texts use the grotesque to evoke a particular response about the way society is organized. In these texts, the grotesque points out the artificiality of unjust social structures.

And that, I'd suggest, is one of the strengths of the New Weird, at least in those texts that draw on the grotesque: with its apparent interest in the urban and the corporeal as an arena for power struggle, alongside its weird aesthetic, the New Weird seems to have a built-in faculty for social critique (or access to it, in any case).

One of speculative fiction's great abilities is to defamiliarize our own world so that we can better see it ― and the New Weird has a way of fore-fronting how the social terrain operates and affects everyday people. Within this equation of grotesque mode/urban focus, the New Weird presents a platform for addressing all sorts of issues ― class (see Bishop's
The Etched City),
racism (see "Dradin, In Love" in
City of Saints),
imperialism (see Miéville's "The Tain"). In this sense, New Weird is one of the most radical phantoms yet to haunt fantasy literature.

Despite this possible radicalism, it is worth noting that one area hasn't been much explored within the texts being called New Weird: the interrogation of gender and sexuality. For instance, the New Weird could function as a framework for interrogating the discursive production of masculinity and femininity as exaggerations (enter: the grotesque) of sexual dimorphism, issues of power and the body, gendered social inequality, assumptions about normative sexuality and gender ― all of these issues could be productively explored or interrogated through a New Weird mode. It will be interesting to see if, in future years, feminist writers find the New Weird mode a productive space in which to undertake their work.

Another characteristic of the New Weird texts is the mix and medley of fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. New Weird texts often take place in extensively developed secondary worlds governed by metaphysics more magical than scientific ― the stuff of fantasy ― even though they are presented as the latter, the stuff of science fiction. See, for instance, the interdimensional paralyzing "oneirochromatophores" of the slake-moths' wings in
Perdido,
and the magic aether of Ian R. MacLeod's
The Light Ages,
which is the keystone of this alternate-history England's economy. This particular blend of genres, cast so often within a grotesque aesthetic, simultaneously seems new and harks back to the "weird" fiction of the early twentieth century, before the genres had emerged or coalesced into the forms as we know them today.

This parallels a current overarching impulse in speculative fiction -the speculative literary mode seems to be undergoing an upheaval, or at least a persistent interrogation, of genre boundaries. We can see this in the increasing popularity of slipstream, which obscures the boundaries between speculative and mimetic (realistic) literature. And we can see it as well in the Interstitial Arts movement, which is interested in cross-pollination, as they say, between the different arts. It's not just speculative fiction ― scholar Brian McHale suggests that since the 1950s, there has been influence back and forth between mimetic/mainstream literature and science fiction.although for the first couple decades, each was looking not at contemporary but older phases of the other. They finally caught up with each other ― both started looking at contemporary manifestations of the other ― in the 1970s or so (228). Today, this back-and-forth influence is visible in contemporary mimetic fiction like that of Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs, Angela Carter, and in Vladimir Nabokov's
Ada,
as McHale points out, and I'd suggest also Kurt Vonnegut and Don DeLillo ― and others besides. Perhaps cross-pollination can also be seen between fantasy and mainstream literatures in the work of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism, and in works such as Toni Morrison's
Beloved
and Leslie Marmon Silko's
Ceremony,
to name a very few. Mainstream and speculative fictions are merging to where some points overlap. I believe the New Weird is an example of that process. More specifically, the New Weird constitutes a unique moment or position in which overlapping speculative genres also overlap with mainstream literature.

So, to me, the New Weird represents a productive experiment in fantasy fiction. The New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s arguably embodied science fiction's claim to literary "seriousness." This desire for seriousness is not snobbery, as sometimes suggested by folks who overemphasize the entertainment function of speculative fiction; it's about recognition of the vast possibilities within the field. To this end, one thing that has been productive about the New Weird is its salient critical function (and the attention to style and quality of writing certainly does not hurt). This is not to say, of course, that fantasy before this point had no critical function, or inspired writing, for that matter ― fantasy has always been as capable as mainstream fiction of being serious-minded, contemplative, artful, and visionary. Rather, what is useful here for fantasy as a literature is the conversation New Weird has incited about the critical role fantasy can play, if its readers and writers choose, and the genre's capacity for creative brilliance. True, the conversation about New Weird has turned some people off for various reasons; but in the meantime, for others, I think it's expanded what we as a community
say
fantasy can do. It's about the narrative of this genre, not the actuality of it.

That's why, in once sense, it doesn't matter if the New Weird "actually" exists ― whether it's just a rogue chill breeze raising goosebumps, or whether there really is a phantom rattling the windows and making discomfiting noises here. Because of the conversation surrounding its possible existence, the New Weird has changed the speculative fiction landscape, widened the horizons ― a lot or a little depending on where you're standing. For this reason, I expect this particular phantom will continue to haunt the literary landscape for a long time to come.

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt.
On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. McHale, Brian.
Constructing Postmodernism.
New York: Routledge, 1993.

Whose Words You Wear

K. J. BISHOP

THERE IS no doubt some advantage to be had from labelling fiction under rubrics of genre, period, style, and all else that helps a reader find, on the shelves of a bookstore, something to their taste. But there are disadvantages, too, for both reader and writer, the chief of these being, I think, that a label invites a particular reading of the work and discourages other readings. If we are told that a book is Modernist we will most likely read it through a filter made of our knowledge of Modernism. That filter may be useful, and even quite necessary to an understanding of the writer's methods. However, we might be so satisfied with our view of how the book sits in the Modernist canon that we don't think about where else it might fit. A minute's thought about the bookshelves of literature, as opposed to those of bookshops, tells us that they are not simply linear. They are more like the London Underground or Paris Metro, only more complex by orders of magnitude, with books sitting at many-rayed junctions of theme, genre, style, intention, idea, and the taxonomic mind, however exact and exhaustive it tries to make its labels, is not looking at dinosaur bones or mineral specimens, however much it wishes it were. It is working in conditions perfused with the subjectivity that attends all understanding of all art, so it ought not to be too cocky about the labels it comes up with.

The label on the front of this volume, "New Weird," rather obviously tells readers to expect something new and weird. But since both terms are relative, readers may not find their expectations of either fulfilled.

This is a problem with all genre labels. The horror story someone read was not horrific enough, the fantasy was not fantastical enough, the science fiction romance novel was not romantic enough or not science fictional enough ― then the taxonomist steps in and tries to make things better. I admit my instinct is to see the taxonomist as a ludicrous figure. However, one hears what he has to say about the reading of the label "fantasy," to use the example of that immense genre into which much of the so-called New Weird fits. "Fantasy" has become associated in many people's minds with stories and themes that are very
familiar
― the bil-dungsroman, the war story, the quest ordained to succeed, all decorated with trappings of magic and miracle that paradoxically lose their strangeness when placed in a world where they are known and understood; it has come to be attended by readerly expectations of certain fixes, notably of immersion in a diverting secondary world, wish-fulfillment, and vicarious power-tripping. It therefore might not be entirely useless for a writer whose fantasies are of a different sort to accept, however charily, a label that suggests the
unfamiliar,
if only to reduce the chance of disappointing readers' expectations.

This acceptance, though, is very different from holding the label in one's bosom. Some writers in this book may feel a sense of personal allegiance to the New Weird; others may feel quite ho-hum about it. There is no New Weird manifesto. Definitions and bibliographies of the New Weird have been made by a fluid, unofficial committee of Adams, few of whom would, I think, erect a barrier inscribed with "Here Be the New Weird; Yonder Be Naught but the Old Ordinary." It's a fuzzy label, really, its very relativity a nod in deference to the difficulty of labelling literature.

But the label exists and I have set myself the task of tackling it a little, so to the "New", which a reading
contra
something old, whatever that might be ― and Ecclesiastes comes to mind. Literature is a product of its influences. We all riff off something, work against a certain background, mine a vein of thought or style to which somebody else showed us the way. So what is the Old against which the New Weird sets itself? Every writer in this book would probably have a different answer. I'm inclined to say, firstly, hang on ― wasn't "Make it new!" a Modernist catch-cry, and didn't Postmodernism remind us that we've been living in a pile of bric-a-brac since a month or two, give or take, after we came down from the trees?

Perhaps the only sensible and seemly reply is to say that you're trying to make a semblance of newness out of the bric-a-brac. (I feel Jerry Cornelius leering over my shoulder ― but Jerry wanted more than semblance, I now remember.) Eclecticism, writerly text, non-linear structures attempt to introduce into fantasy species of narrative not native to the genre, defamiliarisation of the ordinary and insertion of the ordinary into the fantastic, and, I would argue, a tendency to thin or vandalise the fourth wall while generally, though not always, stopping short of knocking it down, are all common features of texts found under the New Weird rubric; however, these tactics are not new, nor have they rusted in a cupboard since the heyday of the British New Wave (writers including Richard Calder, Jonathan Carroll, Iain M. Banks and Hugh Cook come to mind), nor were they even new then.