Plot Studies (2): The Weird

Plot Studies (2): The Weird

Given the weird’s relationship to the feeling of wrongness, it’s worth remembering that a codified weird wouldn’t be weird. The weird is a fog and a field and moves in strange topographies and I have a feeling it merits a lifetime of consideration. But this is a one-day study, so we will pause in a just a small set of containers: the OED, and the writing of the critic Mark Fisher. Although the weird in fiction is strongly associated with the weird tale, a fantasy/horror hybrid, I think its affordances permeate a much broader swath of storytelling.

The concept of affordance comes from the ecological psychologist James J. Gibson: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.” Translated to storytelling, think of affordance as an element in a story that opens paths the story might unfold, whether in its event structure or its telling. It might be worth foregrounding affordance to think about the weird, as in a way, the weird is not so much a specific narrative pattern as a weird torque in the way an environment provisions or furnishes something to its inhabitants (whether characters or narrators or readers/spectators). If affordance is the environment’s furnishings for good or ill, maybe the weird has something to do with finding oneself bound specifically to the ill parts.

Sidebar: If you want to think more about affordance, the Wikipedia entry on affordance is a good overview.

This feeling that the weird is linked to being bound to the good or ill possibilities of the landscape actually held up in the word’s etymology which derives from the old-English wyrd, meaning fate, itself derived from an old Norse word for become. The etymology also helps differentiate weird from strange. If strangeness signals the presence of something foreign (making strangeness a category of perception, recognition, understanding), the weird is distinctively linked to an opening or unfolding in the space of home or neighborhood. (More on this below.) There is a quality of entrapment, ownership, or obligation to weird events: a claim they make on us. Perhaps the fated quality of that claim is as forgotten as the original meaning of weird. Forgotten but there in its unsettling affect. The weird sisters are the fates. They show up in Macbeth as an imprint of that image.

Here’s some OED for you before we go further, definitions plus first instances of the word in print:

Weird, NOUN

Old English wyrd (feminine), = Old Saxon wurd (plural wurdi ), Old High German wurt , Old Norse urð-r , from the weak grade of the stem werþ- , warþ- , wurþ- to become: see worth v.1
1A) The principle, power, or agency by which events are predetermined; fate, destiny.

1B)  Magical power, enchantment.

plural. The Fates, the three goddesses supposed to determine the course of human life.

Weird, ADJ

1) Having the power to control the fate or destiny of human beings, etc.; later, claiming the supernatural power of dealing with fate or destiny.

c1400    Sc. Trojan War  ii. 2818   Vþeris said sche was, I trow, A werde-sister, I wait neuir how.

2A) Partaking of or suggestive of the supernatural; of a mysterious or unearthly character; unaccountably or uncomfortably strange; uncanny.

1817    P. B. Shelley Laon & Cythna  ix. viii. 197   Some said, I was a fiend from my weird cave, Who had stolen human shape.

2) of sounds or voices.

1816    P. B. Shelley Alastor 3   In lone and silent hours, When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness.

3) Of strange or unusual appearance, odd-looking.

1816    P. B. Shelley Alastor 31   Mutable As shapes in the weird clouds.

4) Out of the ordinary course, strange, unusual; hence, odd, fantastic. (Frequently in recent use.)1820    J. Keats Lamia  i, in  Lamia & Other Poems 9   I..bade her steep Her hair in weïrd syrops, that would keep Her loveliness invisible.

Weird, VERB (!)
1) transitive. To preordain by the decree of fate; esp. in passive to be destined or divinely appointed to, into, or unto (with infinitive or n.).

a1300    Cursor Mundi 23368   Ne hert mai think þaa ioies sere, þat iesus crist has dight til his, þat weirrded er vnto þe bliss.

2) To assign to (a person) as his fate; to apportion as one's destiny or lot.

c1550    Clariodus (1830) i. 1030   The Waird Sisteris..wairdit me, gif ane knave chyld war I, That efter I was sevin ȝeiris old To be transformit in ane lyoun bold.

3) To warn or advise by the knowledge of coming fate.

1806    R. Jamieson Pop. Ballads I. 237   I wierd ye, gangna there!

Derivatives of Verb:

Weirded adj

1820    W. Scott Monastery II. iii*. 140   Say, what hath forged thy wierded [footn. fated] link of destiny with the House of Avenel?

weirding  n.

weirding peas  n. peas employed in divination.

1804    W. Tarras Poems 68   Jock Din is to the yard right sly, To saw his wierdin piz.

transitive. slang (chiefly U.S.).  to weird out: to induce a sense of discomfort, alienation, strangeness, etc., in; to make anxiously uncomfortable. Frequently in past participle.

1970    P. de Lissovoy Feelgood xvii. 177   It was weirding her out to have me around as a member of the house.

2002    N.Y. Times Mag. 16 June 51/3   I've been raising goats for years, I love them, so at first the idea of making them secrete spider silk kind of weirded me out.

If we entertain the idea that weirdness requires a subcurrent of fatedness, where does that leave us with respect to plot? Does weirdness in story have to do with a character, group, or the reader (considering the reader as actively in relation to the story, not just passive witness to it) finding out something about their lives or their home that cannot be escaped? A weird becoming: to find out something imperative about who you are, something that lays a claim on your even as it undoes what you thought was the foundation of your life or the place to which you belong? A surprising kinship changes the way you exist in your body, your home.

STRANGENESS DISAMBIGUATION

For me the most pleasing and productive way to disambiguate the weird from the strange is to think about locating the eruption of the weird at home in distinction from the strange, which comes from a distance. Taking this idea up, the project of “making strange” (verfremdung) that many 20th century aesthetic movement embraced becomes something like the production of a kind of freedom: the familiar becomes strange, we are able to look at it as if unattached to it, producing many possible effects including beauty and charm as well as unsettlement, whereby our home is less familiar to us, and we less knit to it. Whereas the weird is the destroyer of freedom. The weird reveals a strangeness in the home and insists that it is us. The weird is a plot of making strangeness tethered to our very being.

CASE STUDIES FROM MARK FISHER

Here are some distillations of Mark Fisher’s case studies in his book, The Weird and The Eerie, which is mostly concerned with both of those things in relation to horror and fascination.

Fisher thinks of the weird as having to do with the outside, the conjoining of the inside (the place of belonging) with the outside (that which doesn’t belong). He differentiates weirdness and eeriness spatially: the weirdness is an eruption in the home; the eerie belongs to landscapes at least “partially emptied of the human.” Evoking the archaic meaning of weird as fate, he links the power of fate to the outside – beyond the scale of a life, beyond human agency.

He writes: “What is the weird? When we say something is weird, what kind of feeling are we pointing to? I want to argue that the weird is a particular kind of perturbation. It involves a sensation of wrongness: a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here. Yet if the entity or object is here, then the categories which we have up until now used to make sense of the world cannot be valid. The weird thing is not wrong, after all: it is our conceptions that must be inadequate.”

CASE STUDY 1: H.P. LOVECRAFT

fascination

“an outside that breaks through in encounters with anomalous entities from the deep” – “fascination… integral to the concept of the weird—the weird cannot only repel, it must also compel our attention” — “fascination … is the engine of fatality in Lovecraft’s fictions, fascination that draws his bookish characters towards … dissolution, disintegration or degeneration”

Fisher notes that Lovecraft’s anomalous entities are presented as material parts of what Lovecraft calls the “real externalities” of a nature beyond human the human compass. It’s not the Euclidean universe (a shorthand for nonweird nature understanding that Wellman also uses), but a “hypernaturalism” – “an expanded sense of what the material cosmos contains.” For this reason, says Fisher, Lovecraft’s stories aren’t fantasy. He also notes that Lovecraft doesn’t hold this same semantic distinction, but for Fisher, fantasy is set in other worlds, whereas he points out that Lovecraft always sets his stories in real places, so that the unsettlement is an irruption of the landscape of, often, New England. “It is this irruption into this world of something from outside which is the marker of the weird.”

Case Study 2: H.G. Wells, “The Door in the Wall”

The Door in the Wall is narrated by Redmond, who tells the story of his friend Wallace who, as a child, found a green door in a wall. Attracted to it, he goes through and finds a garden of wonder and joy, then somehow through reading a book finds himself first in the picture in the book, then back on the street pictured, weeping. He is haunted by fears he may never see it again,

Several times later in life he sees the door but is unable to enter because in the middle of exigent circumstances; His narrative to his friend is of his anguish over failing to go through the door. Finally he is found dead in a deep construction site.

Unlike in Lovecraft, Wallace’s feeling for the weird opening is one of longing, not horror-fascination; he calls it “the melancholic weird.” The real (garden) beyond the real (normal life) is more real (true, belonged to) than the real (normal life). The two are incommensurate and the effect is fatal. Fisher here emphasizes the story design of the threshold, that the story centers on traversing the threshold where the weird folds into the real. This doorway-threshold-portal is a necessary feature of the weird, says Fisher.

Case Study 3: The Fall (the band)

Following up in the incommensurate aspect of the weird, the folding together of things that don’t belong, Fisher moves to the poetics of the band The Fall, tracking them through ideas of the grotesque. First he gives the origin of the word grotesque, from statues found in a grotto in which humans sprout nonhuman things – and intermingling vegetation and faces. The grotesque is an out-of-place binding based in category problems. Not only are the Fall’s lyrics flush with references to grotesquery and weird tales, leering hobgoblins etched onto staid bureaucratic offices, for Fisher the Fall’s aesthetic is built on a class-based grotesque: working class post-punk invading modernist art rock. It’s beyond satire: “The Fall’s laughter does not issue from the commonsensical mainstream but from a psychotic outside. This is satire in the oneiric mode of Gillray, in which invective and lampoonery becomes delirial, a (psycho)tropological spewing of associations and animosities, the true object of which is not any failing of probity but the delusion that human dignity is possible … we could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of recombining nature’s products into hideous new forms.”

Case Study 4: Tim Powers, “The Anubis Gates”

The next study is Tim Powers’ “The Anubis Gates,” whose weird effects are in the time dimension: an ouroboros time travel circuit that recalls for Fisher Douglas Hofstadter’s description of a “strange loop” (see DH’s weird, lovely study of what makes a self, I am a Strange Loop) in which “the ordered hierarchy between cause and effect is fatally disrupted.” In The Anubis Gates, Doyle, an academic caught up in an immortality body-hopping scheme for a wealthy dying man. Back in time, he finds out that he needs to write the work he has spent his life studying, and is faced with the choice of whether to write that work or not—the critical point is that the work exists outside of him. “Like his unhappier time-displaced fellow, Jack Torrance in The Shining, Doyle has always been the caretaker. The mise-en-abyme here produces a charge of the weird, both because of the scandal of the uncreated thing, and because of the twisted causality that has allowed such a thing to exist.” Here the threshold is a fold, a circle. The threshold traverses the entire shape; the is impossible to locate.

Case Studies 5 & 6: Fassbinder, PKD, David Lynch

The last two of Fisher’s weirdness case studies follow the strange loop into ontological status, productive a kind of tangled wrongness weird that Fisher calls “unworlding.” Looking at Fassbinder’s miniseries (based on Simulation-3, a sci-fi novel by Daniel F. Galouye) Welt am Draht (World on Wire)[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kob-oywkvBk] and Phillip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, he looks at weird tales of simulations, where, as with the strange time loop of the Anubis Gates, there is a fatal disruption in the ordering of cause and effect, or of hierarchy of status as real between simulations and the supposedly real world. In the Fassbinder, efforts to “move up” from the simulation to a higher world only result in a higher world that is exactly like the simulation, which in turn sucks the reality out of every level; nothing has reality except as an image: “once Stiller’s faith in his initial lifeworld is shattered, there is no possibility of fully believing in any reality.” In the PKD, a very Twilight Zone kind of story in which every detail of a small town is slowly revealed to be a set or façade, the same unmooring happens: “In the novel, the feeling of the weird is not generated by a collision of worlds, but by the passage out of a ‘realistic’ world into an ‘unworld.’ After it is downgraded to a simulation, the realistic world is not so much invaded as erased.”

If the Fassbinder and Dick stories unworld into a kind of desert or void, David Lynch’s weird, looked at through the films Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, is marked by passing through holes. No reality is firmly established as real; maybe all of them are dreams. There is no way to add them up into a model. The whole is a convoluted, irreducible warren full of corridors, curtains, and holes. “Instead of looking inside (the characters) for some final key to the film, we must attend to the strange folds, burrows, and passageways of [its] weird architecture, in which no interior space is ever secure for long, and gateways to the outside can open up practically everywhere.” In this weird architecture, the outside becomes a new inside punctured by or puncturing a new outside, and so on, losing even the clarity of the single loop of the ouroboros. And yet, each film seems to tease, we can’t help but fall for each new illusion, attempt to anchor ourselves in it.

THE UNIVERSE IS WEIRD // OVER TO YOU // WHAT’S THE GOOD OF THE WEIRD

Fisher’s examples mostly skirt horror-inflected weirdness, but the first points toward the last point I want to rest on before finishing. Recall the idea that Lovecraft’s weird cosmos, though invented, is supposed to feel like it is the nature we inhabit. We can also look to science for a vocabulary of weirdness that isn’t invented. There’s quantum weirdness, fractal weirdness. There’s the weirdness that light is particle and wave or that when you look at the stars you’re seeing the past. There’s the weirdness of the incredible compression of the big bang or the possibility that our universe is in a cycle of big bangs, expansions, and contractions. If narrative is largely a project of containing, transmitting, and making sense of things, could weird narrative be a project of transmitting a container for an encounter with a context that frustrates sense and yet is true, whether in nature as science understands it or in the reality and truth of a fictional story world?

Fisher’s study and the OED suggest a few features of the weird you can pick up to play forward into plot thinking: the mechanism of a threshold, the inability to reduce the fraction of the one real over the other real, as they meet in a character’s experience, and perhaps an undercurrent of fate, fatality, entrapment in the weird current.

What are questions or games you can pose for yourself to find the outside to the reality of your plot? What kinds of threshold devices exist? Is anything in an existing plot primed to become a portal or threshold? An affordance you hadn’t noticed? There might be many moods produced by this encounter. Fisher’s examples take us through horror-fascination, melancholy longing and despair, loss of belief, and a feeling of being dreamed by something, of an unreal status. What other moods could belong to weird irruptions or passages? What kind of health does the weird offer to a character, a reader, a story?

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?