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Weird Fiction
A Genre Study
Michael Cisco
Weird Fiction
Michael Cisco
Weird Fiction
A Genre Study
Michael Cisco
CUNY Hostos Community College
Bronx, NY, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-92449-2 ISBN 978-3-030-92450-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92450-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
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, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms 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 specific 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 affiliations.
Cover illustration: Heritage Image Partnerships Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
1 Genre and Judgement 1
2 The Supernatural 27
3 The Bizarre 57
4 Destiny 85
5 Case Studies121
Case Studies123
Bibliography319
Index327
v
CHAPTER 1
Genre and Judgement
In “The Law of Genre,” Jacques Derrida and Avital Ronell define genre as
an exclusive category; that is, genre is defined by the fact that it must shut
something out. The chapter opens with this observation: “As soon as the
word ‘genre’ is sounded … a limit is drawn. And when a limit is estab-
lished, norms and interdictions are not far behind: ‘Do,’ ‘Do not’ says
‘genre’”1 and closes, predictably, with this: “it would be folly to draw any
sort of general conclusion here.”2 My folly ensues below.
The first thing to note here, before going further, is that when Derrida
and Ronell speak of genre, they are following Genette and speaking of the
differences between novels and short stories, plays and poems. Weird fic-
tion is not a genre the way a novel is a genre, since we will include in the
genre of weird fiction examples drawn from short stories and novels,
poetry, plays, and screenplays; so there is already a bit of a mismatch
between these two uses of the term genre. While Derrida and Ronell
invert the more familiar, inclusive idea of genre, they don’t innovate in
genre studies so much as they send us down a cul-de-sac, by defining
genre negatively. The resulting definition is likely to be only whatever
remains after performing all the genre’s exclusions, which was, perhaps,
the point, since a definition also excludes possibilities. What is excluded
from this definition of genre is an accounting for that exclusionary activity
itself, which would necessarily address the appeal of a genre. Our defini-
tion of genre here is liable to do the same if we’re not careful to draw a
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Cisco, Weird Fiction,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92450-8_1
2 M. CISCO
general inclusion, such that the idea of genre remains open and dynamic,
operating productively in terms of a selection. What is genre, positively
speaking? What is it that selects which differences matter?
Deleuze and Guattari, among other post-structuralist thinkers, compli-
cate any territorial concept of definition.3 The difficulty is not that there is
a territory established, since this is impossible to avoid: territories maintain
themselves through our various logics and grammars. The difficulty is that
art is constantly deterritorializing; in other words, it isn’t the same thing
over and over, even if the each work of art is consistent with other works
of art. Art persists through time as art by repeating, but not by repeating
the same particular works of art. Instead, art exists in a condition of con-
stant reinvention, albeit with ongoing relationships to established art, and
so genre definitions are always more or less behind the times. Definitions
are hard to make because they want to be able to predict the future, or
even to judge the present, but so often they are basically only descriptions
of what has usually been done up to now. Genre in fiction may posit a sort
of model story, a transcendent one that we never actually read, but which
seems to stand behind any given example. However, it is better to say that
the model story is an aggregate of existing stories, coming about after the
fact, rather than the cause of these actual stories. A weird tale may be writ-
ten in keeping with such an aggregate model, but it is important to under-
stand that this model is not fixed or determinative; in fact, the genre waits
for stories that are very different. The genre then is not a transcendent
identity, but a virtuality that is concretely immanent to weird fiction,
which is an elaborate way of saying that the genre is in all the stories writ-
ten to date; it is the selection that gathers certain stories into certain can-
ons for certain readers and writers. We may come up with a checklist of
common tropes in weird fiction; this is not a waste of time, but it is not the
whole story, either, since such a list isn’t going to help us to understand
the selections that produced it. So, this study will address the concept that
guides the selection of what we call weird fiction.
The end result still involves collecting various stories and grouping
them as weird fiction. The difference, however, is that these stories are
selected because they are germ cultures, which generate more stories. In
this way, the productive aspect of weird fiction as a genre can be studied
and we can understand that the genre exclusion process is part of larger
productive process.
Instead of thinking of a canon in terms of provisionally fixed genre
boundaries, this approach will think of canonizations; whenever a certain
1 GENRE AND JUDGEMENT 3
culture of weird fiction develops, it organizes its own canon, and as new
kinds of weird fiction are created, new canons arise and old ones adjust.
Coming up with a concept of weirdness will not only make an understand-
ing of the genre easier, it will also mean we can establish connections with
works not considered weird fiction without being compelled to claim
them for the genre, to the exclusion of other genres.
The point of all this is to see if we can “have done with judgement,” in
keeping with the recommendations of Deleuze and Guattari. That is to say,
we are throwing away the cookie cutters of genre analysis. What would a
genre study that has done with judgement look like? And would it make any
difference? Would it entail a judgement banishing “general conclusions”?
Having done with judgement means taking up the question of genre
without treating it as a preconceived idea, but rather in a more investiga-
tive way. This monograph aspires to be that kind of criticism. As this work
on the genre of weird fiction develops, it will also develop its own genre of
criticism; this which may turn out to be nothing more than the author’s
folly, but it will be a useful one even if it is only an example of how not to
proceed.
***
An immanent genre is one whose resemblances are reciprocal. They are

understood less in terms of a fixed content or form, and more as repeti-
tions with a shared orientation—that is, the desire or affect. Within genres,
stories produce other stories without acting as transcendental models.
Where stories are copies of other stories, or to the extent they are copies,
they treat some prior story as at least locally transcendent, but where there
is original work, there is a more rhizomatic branching-off. This study pos-
its genre as an orientation, which is to say it selects and ranks certain
affects, but those affects need not be considered transcendent, and, in fact,
there is something about the repetition of the same that destroys affects.
The repetition of the affect depends on a certain amount of difference.
Criticism, as Derrida points out, insofar as it approaches genre as a logi-
cal problem, rests on a contradiction involving boundaries: is a boundary
inside what it bounds, or outside? In defining what it must exclude, the
boundary ends up including those exclusions. However, this is not really a
difficulty for anyone trying to understand genre practically. Genre does
seem to have a transcendent aspect, as it seems to sit above the fiction it
categorizes, apparently defining it, judging what is in and what is out, but
4 M. CISCO
without our ever encountering the genre per se, only its examples. This is
where judgement comes in. But this only means that a genre is an encoun-
ter with an example, a sort of logical distribution. We can parse the world
in all manner of logical schemes, but the ones that are useful are the ones
we keep. Merely being logical is not enough, nor does this logic produce
new art. Weird fiction has its pillars, the uncontestedly canonical works
like Dracula and The Turn of the Screw, but it’s also obvious that weird
fiction is not constant through time, but changeable and adaptable. The
genre and its canonical works support, reread, and rewrite each other.
Derivative stories merely copy models; more original stories will extend
the orientation of the genre further or develop a new way to travel in that
direction, often from a starting point in other fictions, which then become
canonical for that new story. The canon is a genealogical mesh, varying
from one work to another, and exclusions and inclusions are carried out
experimentally in order to find a way to travel. Travelling in a direction has
no necessary connection to any idea, adequate or otherwise, of a destina-
tion, and often one travels only to see what there is to see in that direction.
***
The genre of weird fiction is a means of production. With it, a writer pro-
duces stories which, as commodities, have a dual orientation, both use and
exchange values. While, in this monograph, the orientation towards a use
value will be more important—and rightly so, since it is the use value that
involves something immanent to the work of art—the use value of a weird
tale can’t simply be divorced from its exchange value without a word or
two about it. Here use needs to be understood as the realization of desire,
rather than the narrower realization of practical utility. Perhaps this means,
depending on the story, only that the writer was prompted to write the
story for pay.4 We should say, though, that the art-commodity produces
forms, as models to be strictly copied. This is one locality where the
boundaries between genres are actually policed as a kind of property right,
although even here the policing may be restricted to a single venue.
Sometimes a single venue’s rejection is enough.
The genre of weird fiction is full of redundancy. Select any conventional
theme, and there will be dozens if not hundreds of interchangeable stories
on that theme, along with the noteworthy ones. What else can account for
this, if not what we would have to describe as the promotion of exchange
value and the demotion of use value. To produce redundant fictions in
order to sell them to a market defined by that redundant model is to write

copies of models, so that the market in weird fiction will set up a series of
locally transcendent “popular” models. Innovative stories don’t simplisti-
cally oppose these transcendent models—they connect the stories to
immanent forces that the mere copies ignore. They de-transcendentalize
the stories. These innovative stories may or may not start off a new round
of robotic copying, but they always arise in the midst of writing, not out-
side or at the beginning, nor do they necessarily involve some logical
scheme of categorization.
***
So, to return to the idea of a canon: if we designate a canon, or a period,

for weird fiction, we find ourselves outside of it, trying to impose logical
limitations on the genre externally. Then we have to somehow account for
this position; we have to be able to say why we are in a position to do this,
and do it in a binding way. However, in modern critical parlance, this idea
of weird fiction and these works have arisen for reasons that must be at
least partially immanent, and rather than try to come up with an external
definition, it seems better to say that weird fiction is a way of writing fic-
tion that arises out of the internal self-difference of religious, moralizing,
and/or a certain strain of philosophizing fiction writing, when producing
the bizarre becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end (that
end usually being greater piety, more obedience, etc.). There are many
examples of weird tales, such as “A Christmas Carol,” which contain ser-
mons without being sermons. The story, in such cases, does more than
illustrate a moral point, but has attractions of its own. While “A Christmas
Carol” does function primarily as a kind of sermon, Dracula is not pri-
marily a vindication of the cross.
If structure simply means having some kind of organization, then genre
is structure, but calling a genre a structure according to this definition is
tantamount to identifying genre with structure and with organization,
then calling it a day. This definition won’t help to explain why a given
structure is different from another. So a genre is not just a plan, it’s an
assemblage, collecting works and critical perspectives and connecting
them together. The assemblage of weird fiction dynamically continues to
produce a weird line, and to extend that weird line across breaks in genre
conventions to reach new connections, which amount to deterritorializing
weird fiction as a genre. The conventions have to be included in the
6 M. CISCO
scheme of the genre, but they do more than sit there; they are more than
ad hoc content. Genre conventions can only repeat by differing from their
past uses. This can mean making superficial alterations or it can mean mak-
ing a more sophisticated use of conventions. The ghost in “Grayling; or
‘Murder Will Out,’” by William Gilmore Simms, is a spectre of guilt in a
conventional narrative of supernatural justice that has little to surprise us
and assures us that the cosmos is itself fundamentally just along Christian
lines. The spectre of a murdered man identifies his killer and makes pos-
sible his capture and punishment. In Aura, Carlos Fuentes hits on the use
of a ghostly presence as a way to capture nostalgia; something he is able to
do because the ghost and nostalgia are both conjured by a particular
desire. A solitary woman lives in a house haunted by the spectre of her
younger self. Aura understands reality in the relativistic way that is, by
now, rather old hat; a way that allows contradictions, such that the posit-
ing of a ghost is not controversial. Involving a ghost requires no justifica-
tion, because the modern audience is expected to take for granted an idea
of reality that does not exclude contradictory, localized differences. The
ghost in Simms’ story seems, on the contrary, to insist on an absolute
union between morality and reality. Neither story is unique in the use they
are making of ghosts; their differences are typical of a development of the
genre, although it’s possible to say that Fuentes has only retrieved the idea
of the ghost from weird fiction and employed it in a “psychologically real-
istic” fiction. His realism is only augmented by the fact that he represents
the psychological belief in ghosts. We could look at Aura that way, but is
our reasoning prompted by the novella’s immanent characteristics, or by
something else, like snobbery?
The more important question is this: how do we account for the way
the genre of weird fiction receives both “Grayling” and Aura equally well?
***
Returning to “The Law of Genre” for a moment—Derrida and Ronell

approach genre from a logical point of view, that is, they understand genre
categorically and transcendentally.
Derrida’s theory of genre is based upon the idea that within every categori-
zation there is the implication of its Other, where genre is the normativity
that (attempts) to keep contamination out or at bay. However, in attempt-
ing to police these boundaries, that Other is contained and produced by/
within that [category].5
They are right to say that there is no mixing of genres, but only provided
we look at genre from a transcendent position; genres, however, develop
immanently, not transcendently, and exclusion fills a strictly secondary role
in this process. It is involved only insofar as making a given connection
precludes making some other connection. Certain things are excluded
only insofar as certain things are selected, and the selection process
excludes by affirming what is included.
Weird fiction has a tendency to make genre itself behave bizarrely. If we
try to categorize weird fiction by making the inclusion of what is usually
referred to as the supernatural determinative, then we run into difficulties
insofar as it is impossible to establish the terms of that inclusion in any cat-
egorical way. Instead, we might try to understand the genre in terms of the
territory it selects for deterritorialization, which in this case would be real-
ity. Weird fiction is weird because it gives us reality itself as a territory that
can be deterritorialized, where it is taken for granted that this is not possible.
What is weird about weird fiction? It is supernatural fiction, but it is not
Fantasy (capitalized to distinguish the genre from fantasy as a daydream or
desire). It is horror fiction, but it does not depend on real-life horrors,
such as murder or torture. The horror of weird fiction is derived from the
implications of a deterritorialization of ordinary experience, insofar as the
ordinary is fetishized as “reality.” Ordinary experience can be deterritorial-
ized by nonsupernatural experiences, so the supernatural aspect is not nec-
essary to produce the deterritorialization. What makes the supernatural
aspect necessary for weird fiction is the way that it allows fiction to deter-
ritorialize in an ontological or epistemological direction, and so address
reality more broadly, or more basically. Stories of crime horrify us with the
prospect of what human beings are capable of, while stories of supernatu-
ral events threaten readers with the prospect of what experience itself is
capable of, that is, our capacity to affect and to be affected does seem to
extend well beyond the reach of our current understanding and may be
impossible to understand sufficiently. The supernatural of weird fiction is
not a clearly articulated causal system, acting as an alternative to, or as an
esoteric expansion of, known causality; that, I would call Fantasy. Even
where we encounter something like this idea, in fiction belonging to the
“psychic detective” subgenre, for example, the system is never actually
articulated by the author, but only intimated. To the extent that there is a
system, the story inclines more towards Fantasy.
The supernatural of weird fiction, unlike the supernaturalism of theol-
ogy, cannot properly be a category; where it is a category, the story is
8 M. CISCO
Fantasy. Where the supernatural is not a category, but an opening out

towards infinity in experience, then the story is weird.
A weird tale is not weird because it describes events that may or may
not fit into some category of the supernatural; they are events that weirdly
fail to belong to any category. This is all the more alarming since there is,
basically, only supposed to be one category available to stories set more or
less in the here-and-now: the category of reality, or “realism,” or “natural-
ism.” All events occurring in an ordinary setting, the here-and-now of
some historic epoch, “should” be real; the apparent supernatural event
that is debunked turns out to be either a type of real event we call a hoax
or a non-event like a hallucination or a mistake of the kind that the narra-
tor makes in Poe’s “The Sphynx.” If the supernatural were a category of
event, then its reality would be of the same kind as any other reality,
whether that be ordinary reality or crisis reality, and this is how the super-
natural functions in Fantasy. However, where the supernatural is weird, it
is neither a real category nor a category of the unreal. The supernatural in
weird fiction is a simulacrum of reality, insofar as reality is itself considered
a category. This doesn’t mean it’s an illusion, because it can affect us, can
act on its own. Plato must banish the simulacrum because it makes the real
and the false too hard to tell apart; but this is exactly why weird fiction is
fascinated with the simulacrum. It depends on this difficulty in distin-
guishing real and unreal for its characteristic effect, insofar as this difficulty
is experienced and opens experience to broader possibilities, rather than
insofar as the difficulty is merely a logical conundrum, as Todorov would
have it. The target is always the stability of that real category, not the
establishment of an alternative. The supernatural in weird fiction is a
deterritorialization of category, with the intention of creating an open set
where reality would seem to tend to close itself off. Weirdness is what we
call the self-difference of the normal, opening out into the strange from
the normal, rather than jumping from a normal track to a separate fantas-
tic track. If weirdness is the contrast that makes the normal appear, it
doesn’t do this from an external position or a negative position; weirdness
is self-difference of the normal, not the lack of the normal.
***
A genre is produced by literary works and contributes to the production

of literary works. It is organized according to a logic of interests that keeps
changing. Deterritorializations will reterritorialize right away, become
memory-images, and repeat as new models. There is no concern for purity

in the production or reproduction of a genre; that only arises in the logical
definition of genre, which is a cite of contention for control of the repro-
duction of the genre. I’m not interested in developing and imposing a
fixed canon of weird fiction, but understanding where weird fiction takes
us, since it is the orientation of weird fiction that differentiates it from
other genres. This is an immanent understanding, which is to say it sees
weird fiction as arising from an internal self-difference in literature. For
Derrida and Ronell, the genre boundary is basically neither inner nor
outer, but a fold; here we will think of it as something related to the fold,
as a reterritorialization; it isn’t a fixed place or thing, but an event that
repeats.
Naturally a writer picks their sources, their own canon, and, given that
genre is a logical contradiction, this choice cannot be wrong or right when
evaluated from the point of view of some overall logical definition of
genre. Therefore we can dispense with the evaluation of this logical con-
tradiction and survey empirically the use of the concept or conceit of
genre. I repeat that Derrida and Ronell are right; genre is a matter of
preventing mixing when we observe it from above and in pause. Their
account of genre is another form of weird fiction.
Things look different when the perspective is shifted to the level of
production over time. If sense is a product, then the slipperiness of sense
is the productive versatility of sense. The product keeps on producing,
instead of remaining static; that is, a work of art will continue to develop
meanings, but this isn’t a mistake, a failure to remain still, but a sign of life.
Horace Walpole, inventing the Gothic in The Castle of Otranto, steers lit-
erature around back through the middle ages, going in reverse, bearing
modern aesthetic values with him into the past, and revaluing and rein-
venting the medieval in an act of deliberate anachronism. That is, he pro-
duces “the medieval” as a rather haphazard contraction based on his
personal tastes and uses this as his ground or setting. This orientation is
sustained as a memory-image in future Gothic fiction, that is, it repeats,
but with important differences—greater attention paid to naturalistic
character psychology, supernatural manifestations toned down, inner life
Romantically connected to landscape and weather. The contraction is
repeated in The Mysteries of Udolpho and in The Monk, with some elements
retained from Walpole, others added, yet others subtracted or altered.
***
10 M. CISCO
Claire Colebrook writes that a concept is an extreme, not an average.6 If

we try to approach weird fiction as the averaging together of various liter-
ary works belonging to some canon, we fail to explain the formation of the
canon or the selection of those terms we average. It is the concept of weird
fiction that attracts readers and drives writers, and this concept must be an
extreme. If we think of genre in terms of borders, then the borders of a
genre understood as an average would be defined automatically by clichés,
which are stupidities. A genre understood as a direction of travel would
necessarily border on a conceptual horizon that is continually driven for-
ward. No one ever reaches the horizon, but movement in the direction of
the horizon continually discovers new things.
Critics like Fredric Jameson identify ideology as the more or less ines-
capable foundation of all values, and Tzvetan Todorov writes that ideol-
ogy shapes genres.7 If we take this to mean that, no matter what, we never
leave the territory defined by ideology, then there is no accounting for the
changes that do occur. If, on the other hand, we make ideology dynamic,
how then can it remain prior or determinative? Deleuze and Guattari are
sceptical about ideology insofar as it is transcendent; their idea of ideology
is dynamic, without being inconsistent, because it is an immanent ideol-
ogy. The immanent version of ideology is their “major” literature,
described in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Major literature is the
mode of expression proper to ruling elites, those who own the means of
literary production (including platforms); it’s “major” because the elites,
while a headcount minority themselves, are dominant in the majority of
power relations. Minor literature, on the other hand, isn’t unimportant,
an opposite, or a rival to major literature; it’s inside major literature.
The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of

language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the
collective assemblage of enunciation. We might as well say that minor no
longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for
every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established)
literature.8
Deleuze and Guattari associate genre with major literature where minor is
regarded as being sui generis, but isn’t there a major and minor to genre,
that is, major genre is transcendent where minor genre is immanent?
Major literature is always in the service of a status quo, so it can’t say
anything new. In minor literature we see something disappear the way
Cezanne’s paintings disappear, but that is not simply the absence of an

appearance, an exclusion. What disappears is the familiar, the known, but
the familiar, which is major, must appear and then disappear, like the vicar
in M.R. James’ story “A Tale of a Disappearance and an Appearance.” The
local attributes of major literature remain present in the story, but their
“major” character is made to vanish. Blanchot writes, for example, that the
writer, understood as creator of minor literature, is dead, disappeared,
writing about the disappearance of things, that literature is intimately con-
nected with death. The creative author ceases to exist insofar as any reified
idea of an author is concerned. The author must die as a stereotype pour-
ing out clichés in order to disappear into something else not yet known,
hence, alive. The creative author reinvents authorship. What the creative
writer makes disappear is all that stupid trash, the truly dead world we find
ourselves in all too often, all too damned often. This is why minor litera-
ture is so important: only through the minor does literature live and par-
ticipate in the problem of living to its fullest extent. Innovation in major
literature is more like marketing.
The idea of major and minor can be applied to weird fiction in two
ways. First, with respect to the genre’s standing as a whole relative to
“legitimate” literature, and second, with respect to what is major and
minor within the genre. There’s already been plenty of work done to
establish the legitimacy of weird fiction in relation to other genres and to
affirm its artistic value; this study takes that validity for granted and focuses
more on the second question: what is major and minor within the genre?
As “genre” fiction, what is there to weird fiction apart from recycling a
handful of clichés?
Major literature deals in clichés, but what matters more is the power to
demand adherence to clichéd formulas and contents and to banish, bury,
or co-opt work that re-animates these clichés, making them de-clichéd.
This is the broader political question, which goes beyond even the implicit
political content of particular stories to the actual politics of publications,
critical acceptance, and so on. This is why minor literature develops; it
doesn’t compete with major literature, it adopts its clichés in order to use
them against themselves. As a genre, weird fiction will not be all major or
minor, but will move in ways that have major and minor currents pulling
it this way and that. Weird fiction frequently upholds pretty conservative,
majoritarian positions. “A Christmas Carol,” for example, perpetuates the
archetypical bourgeois fallacy that all social problems stem from the aver-
aged consequences of individual moral choices, rather than from an
12 M. CISCO
economic and class system that is inherently exploitative and indifferent to

individual choices. On the other hand, weird fiction often meets the three
criteria for minor literature listed above; that is, weird fiction has its own
weird ways of meeting these criteria. The deterritorialization of language
occurs when the weird tale takes us towards the sublime, the indescrib-
able, the ineffable, towards mad ravings, imaginary and transcendent lan-
guages. The individual is connected to the political in weird tales primarily
through the recognition that, one way or another, there is a problem with
reality, one that calls to us, either to escape reality and its attendant prob-
lems or to protect reality from these problems; in other words, while one
might be tempted to dismiss weird fiction as apolitical escapism, this begs
the question: what is it that the reader wants to escape, if not a situation
that does have definite political dimensions and causes? The collective
arrangement of utterance in weird fiction is the way in which this loss of
reality takes place, a way that involves the reader, linking characters and
readers, but also linking readers with other readers.
Does the story disturb the delusional or hallucinating insane ones, even
the daydreaming or fanciful—and therefore socially unproductive—ones,
the drug-addled ones, the possessed ones, the emotionally oversensitive or
overwrought ones, the mystics and other religious nonconformists? Or
does it disturb the people who define themselves as the contraries of these
things, as their mere negation in fact, even though they have difficulty
identifying anything positive in this contrary position? If the normal is
only the absence of the abnormal, then it is the abnormal that is real.
To simplify this, we may come up with a basic spectrum for weird
fiction:
The major strain in weird fiction says: defend the normal.
The minor strain says: beware the normal.
***
Weird fiction involves the supernatural. This can then seem to be determi-
native for the genre, such that every story is understood in terms of a logi-
cal duel between the supernatural and whatever is considered to stand in
opposition to the supernatural—generally, science or materialism. Weird
fiction isn’t anti-science, may indeed be very much pro-science, but char-
acteristically objects to imposition and dogmatism, to the arbitrary limits
that our ideas of the world, humanity, and ourselves impose on imagina-
tion and desire. The major mode identifies two opposing poles, generally
in order to identify the pretender and elect the real thing. Minor literature
doesn’t do this—instead, it occupies the major work and makes use of it
for its own ends. A story that frankly affirms the supernatural over materi-
alism or science, or vice-versa, may be weird, but it is not minor. The
minor form takes existing clichés, scientific or supernatural, and makes
new use of them. Weird fiction isn’t an anti-capitalist genre, either, but it
does often register an objection to the way capitalism not only forecloses
choices but misrepresents the loss of possibilities as a kind of liberation. In
its particular interest in destiny, weird fiction also addresses the way that
capitalism divorces people from any grounding, by staging a kind of
revenge of the ground. Weird fiction is not feminist or anti-racist and is
often filled with prejudice, but it does also at times undermine the confin-
ing categories of sexism and bigotry.
This study is not trying to compose two canons of weird fiction, one
major and the other minor, although it will label the stories it studies
major or minor. However, it is taken for granted here that a given story
will have both major and minor tendencies, and that primary designation
involves seeing which side of the balance tips further. A writer like Lovecraft
will have more major stories and more minor stories, and, in those major
stories, there will be minor moments; vice-versa for those minor stories.
Lovecraft, as one of the principal theorists of weird fiction, can be used
as an example here. His work is majoritarian in its racism and sexism, but
minoritarian in its scepticism about progress, its more socialistic tenden-
cies, its cosmicism, and its treatment of identity. The racism of “The
Shadow Over Innsmouth” is oddly conflicted, given that the inhuman fish
people have all the things Lovecraft valued most in his conservative con-
ception of society: a highly sophisticated aesthetic sensibility and level of
artistic expression, the continuity of generations over time, and an iron-
clad identity so solid that no amount of racial admixture with humans will
prevent them from retaining their innate racial characteristics. It seems
pretty clear that giving all the things he valued most to monsters rather
than humans was part of the horror for Lovecraft, but that horror is inex-
tricably bound to the horror of racist persecution. There are moments,
both here and in At the Mountains of Madness, when Lovecraft seems to
waver in identification between wholesome humans and monsters; iden-
tity is precarious and must be defended (major) but part of what we are
defending it against is our own impulse to reject our identity, which is
14 M. CISCO
more minor. In The Lurking Fear, the narrator speaks of a desire to aban-
don himself to the nightmare, to become part of it, which is the fate of the
narrator in “The Outsider.” This probably arises in the main from a desire
to escape vulnerability by siding with the threat, becoming part of it,
choosing a less vulnerable identity than that of an ordinary person.
However, the ordinary identity is normally presented as natural, inevita-
ble, healthy, and correct; it’s one thing to say that identity must face its
contrary, the loss of identity, but if that contrary is not purely negative, not
the absence of identity, but the presence of a different identity, then the
necessity, the salubriousness, the superiority of the normal identity is no
longer self-evident and automatic. The very defence of the normal makes
us aware that it isn’t the only way. For all that the story has strong racist
elements; “The Call of Cthulhu” is a call that anyone of sufficient sensitiv-
ity can hear. It can sound in anyone’s dreams, not just the dreams of the
“lesser” humanity.
The common thread in the minor mode is a desire for escape in an
undefined direction, and generally what is to be escaped is identity. Kant’s
noumena—God, the world, and the soul—are, for him, the indemonstra-
ble limits of experience which act to ground all identity, understood here
in the broad sense of a persistent self-sameness. These ideas percolate into
English Romantic literature, mainly through Coleridge, and into weird
fiction mainly from Coleridge through Poe. Weird fiction is minor insofar
as it thematizes and confronts these limits, and challenges identity in that
broad sense, in God, in the world, and in soul or ego. For major weird
fiction, this is an attack on identity which must be resisted. For minor
weird fiction, this a form of liberation, however frightening, from these
limits, which appeals to readers who desire to be free of them. Weird fic-
tion is distinguished from Fantasy in that the Fantasy world appears to
provide the reader with an alternative identity, while weird fiction moves
in an undefined, or less defined, direction.9
***
For Deleuze and Guattari, ideas produce differences creatively, while rep-
resentations are those things which are merely indifferent rearrangements
of the same old thing. Any genre will make use of both. Once weird fiction
becomes a commodity, it must be produced in bulk, to reach a large mar-
ket and to help drive the per-story cost down, but it must also innovate, in
order to retain its audience or attract new readers. This pressure builds
deterritorialization into the production process in the same way that other
forms of capitalist production require technical innovation.
Deterritorialization produces ideas, while representations constitute the
territory.
So, for example, the vampire is a representation. It first appears in folk-
tales, which are not commodities. Bram Stoker deterritorialized the vam-
pire when he transposed it from the medieval past to the modern day.
Since every deterritorialization is immediately followed by a reterritorial-
ization, Dracula the innovation becomes Dracula the cliché, a new repre-
sentation. After Stoker, vampires are either Draculas or counter-Draculas.
The 1979 film adaptation of Dracula, starring Frank Langella, deterrito-
rializes Dracula by making him an anti-hero. The plot of the film is itself
Dracula deterritorialized and infiltrated by Joanna Russ’ 1962 short story,
“My Dear Emily” (see below) that does not involve Dracula the character
at all. This deterritorialization is innovation, but it will nevertheless involve
repetition, not only of the text that it takes as its original, but of other
related or unrelated elements. Lord Byron was the model for Polidori’s
vampire, Lord Ruthven, generally regarded as a forerunner of Dracula,
but he does not seem much in evidence in the 1931 adaptation of Dracula,
in which the vampire is presented as a kind of Continental seducer. Lord
Byron clearly returns, however, in Langella’s realization of the character, a
mordant and acerbic puncturer of sexual hypocrisy, redeployed to expose
secular puritanism as a blind for a patriarchalist anxiety about controlling
women’s sexuality. Where Stoker’s Dracula would seem to be in line with
the conservative values of major literature, the 1979 adaptation makes him
plainly minor, because in that version he comes to represent for Mina a
kind of desperate escape from the living death of a conventional bourgeois
existence. She is the only character in the film who meaningfully doubts
his absolute villainy, and she is not saved in the end, when Dracula himself
dies in what looks a little bit like a lynching. This version of Dracula
would then be more on the minor side; “good” wins, but it doesn’t come
out looking “good.”
There are less heady examples. Given enough sequels, most franchise
killers like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger become protagonists after a
while. Mikhail Bakhtin described the carnivalesque as a literary moment in
which the tension between high and low ranks becomes volatile and
unfixed. It’s a kind of domesticated revolt of the low against the high, and
there’s something of this in rooting for the monster. There’s a rejection of
the canonical values which cast the monster as a strictly evil thing. The
16 M. CISCO
living dead are monsters, but, casually shooting Ben at the end of Night of
the Living Dead, the sheriff and his posse seem no less mindless and mon-
strous. “Minor literature” and “Carnivalesque” are not equivalent terms,
but they do interilluminate each other. We might note what appears to be
a major/minor split in this passage from Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics:
It could be said … that a person of the Middle Ages lived, as it were, two
lives: one that was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, sub-
jugated to a strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence
and piety; the other was the life of the carnival square, free and unre-
stricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of every-
thing sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with everyone
and everything.10
This is not unlike descriptions of witches’ sabbath, that early strain of hor-
ror fiction that all too often had real and lethal consequences. Bakhtin’s
carnival is, however, still a festival permitted and organized by the powers
that be in order to further reinforce that first life. Deleuze and Guattari
don’t see the minor as a rival power or counterforce to the major, but
rather as a way of redirecting the major force back onto itself. Nevertheless,
there is a kind of major/minor aspect to the carnivalesque. In a theatre or
with a group of friends in the safety of a living room, watching a horror
film will often be an experience like Bakhtin’s carnival square, looking
onto that official life from the outside. The outsider is a horror to the
insider, but then who is really inside, anyway? Perhaps this helps us to
understand why weird fiction and horror films present us with images of
that official, normal life. The struggle or experiment is to see if we can
think the minor, the escape, without turning it into a representation. Is
this the Latin Quarter of New Orleans, or is it Disneyland?
***
Another difference between major and minor writing: major literature

judges, minor literature warns. In weird fiction, and in Todorov’s false
“choice” between the supernatural and the nonsupernatural, we have, on
the one hand, a variant Platonism in which there is only one reality, for
which the elimination of the other possibility is essential because it is false,
and then, on the other hand, we also have a sort of latter-day Aristotelian
variant, which can admit anything so long as it can find a stable category
for it. Both of these variants involve making judgements based on precon-
ceived ideas of what the overall condition should be, which is to say that
this a matter of moral judgement, in addition to ontological or epistemo-
logical conceptualization. The idea that the cosmos must and can only be
one is used to justify moral and Statist impositions of order, rather than as
a motive to further observation and experiment in an open-ended scien-
tific investigation.
But a story of judgement is also a warning: the minor warns us about
judgement. The ambivalent weird story does warn us away from judging
whether or not the events are definitely supernatural, and to the extent
that it questions the application of judgement to reality, it is minor. Major
literature gives orders and renders verdicts. The minor warns us to avoid
judgement as a negative understanding of difference. If we argue for the
literary merit of weird fiction, there is a danger of forgetting that the nega-
tive difference dividing literature from writing that is not-literature is an
illusion which reaffirms the idea of major literature. The key is to argue for
the importance of the minor without making it major. Minor literature
operates like a simulacrum of major literature, which means it does not put
itself forward as an alternative candidate for literary status, but changes the
way the elections are conducted and sabotages the existing parties.
In Deleuze’s critique of Plato, the simulacrum takes on maximum
importance, because it shows that the conditions for Platonic judgement
are impossible. For Plato, reality is something that is determined by a
judgement between rival claimants, one of whom is true, the other false.
The simulacrum is something that is real and false at the same time, an
impossibility in Plato’s system. It is real, because it is effective, actual,
makes a difference, but not real in that it is not in keeping with a transcen-
dent scheme of reality. This is why art troubles Plato; he needs it to be
subordinate to the real. Art therefore cannot be both false and real accord-
ing to him; it can only be a reality of an inferior degree. According to
Deleuze, a copy of the real thing can’t be real if it makes no difference. If
art is just a copy of reality, if genre is only a matter of copying a model
story, then genre really would only be an averaging after the fact and
unable to account for the genesis of the stories that belong to it. The sto-
ries wouldn’t make a difference, so they wouldn’t be real. This account
wouldn’t be able to explain why everybody would copy a particular model
story, instead of any other; it couldn’t say anything about the origin of the
genre itself.
18 M. CISCO
This question is double for weird fiction, since genre in general and the
genre of weird fiction specifically both tend to be defined negatively, in
terms of judgement. Is literature just phoney life? Idealized life? If litera-
ture can have life, then what do we make of literary chimaeras, like vam-
pires and ghosts? This point is not out of bounds for a genre study of
weird fiction, because the question of the existence of the supernatural
extends beyond the story. Just as a love story presents a specimen of a kind
of interpersonal experience, so a supernatural story presents a specimen of
a certain kind of bizarre experience. Weird fiction dwells exactly on this
spot where judgement cannot stick, which is why it’s a waste of time to
think of weird fiction in terms of a choice the reader is supposed to make
about the existence of the supernatural—a choice which, empirical famil-
iarity tells us, readers never bother to make. In Matter and Memory,
Bergson identifies the distinction between materialism and idealism as a
matter of judgement and goes beyond this distinction with his idea of the
image.11 All things are images, a blend of subjective inner phenomena and
objective outer phenomena, both. The Bergsonian image seems to be his
version of a Spinozan idea; that the appearances of a thing in experience
and in thought are two modes of existence of one thing.
Using Bergson’s concept of the image as a springboard: “fantasy forges
fictive causal chains, illegitimate rules, simulacra of belief, either by con-
flating the accidental and the essential or by using the properties of lan-
guage to substitute” either for “the repetition of similar cases actually
observed” or “a simple verbal repetition that only simulates its effect.”
What’s more, “education, superstition, eloquence, and poetry also work
in this way.”12 With this in mind, we find weird fiction at the intersection
of Fantasy art, literature as what might be meant by poetry and eloquence,
and superstition. Education may be included too, if we recall the idea that
minor literature warns us, often about the limitations of what we learn in
conventional, major curricula.
Horror fiction says yes to whatever we say no to. Even if we feel
Stevenson’s “leap of welcome,”13 an inclination to share in the horror, we
enjoy our own outraged rejection of our own sanctioned impulses, and
this is usually a reactionary aspect of the genre. It helps reenlist readers in
the Victorian task of reproducing the self as something repressed. But to
see it in these terms, while still involving ourselves with judgement, at least
means beginning with an affirmation before moving to a negation, instead
of the other way around. Weird fiction upholds the anti-difference bias,
presenting difference as monstrous, but it also cannot do this without
having to approach difference. The danger here is that this difference will
turn out to be appealingly seductive, more attractive than repulsive, that it
will have simulacrum-power, something positive about it. From the begin-
ning of the Gothic tale, crime and outlaws, “knights and robbers,” have
been every bit as important as ghosts in horror fiction, and there is an
outlaw residue to weird fiction as well. Drawing near to the lawbreaker or
rebel, whose archetype in this literature is Milton’s Satan, we are in dan-
ger. The danger is not so much that we will side with Satan, but that, in
acknowledging that Satan even has a “side” at all, we will fracture an ideol-
ogy which seeks to maintain a monopoly on our perspective, our selves,
and our world. In other words, if we say that evil is more than the absence
of good, but something of its own, then we have already been contami-
nated by the simulacrum. Evil can only be an inferior copy of the good,
officially. If it is something on its own, then there is some other idea of the
good. God is the source of all existing things. If evil is something on its
own, then God created evil, which is impermissible for a perfectly good
God. This religious reasoning outlives religious controversy and survives
in homologies with science; that is, if the supernatural is irrational, then to
assert its existence is to say that not all existence is rational, which requires
us to affirm that science cannot ever explain all existence. If that’s the
case—given that only reason can define the extent of existence susceptible
to scientific understanding, and given that this assertion of the existence of
the irrational as something of its own (and not just as the absence of rea-
son) entails the limitation of reason—how is the sure extent of reason to
be determined at all?
***
Is genre structure? Necessarily? Couldn’t it be a machine, a vehicle, at least

some of the time, and hence more dynamically continuing to produce a
weird line, extend a weird line across breaks, or maybe via breaks, in genre
conventions?
The structuralist approach to weird fiction we find in Todorov identifies
the unresolvedly ambiguous supernatural story as the true form, with two
subsets which arise when a verdict is called for.14 That is to say, the struc-
turalist study of the genre depends entirely on judgement, and where that
judgement is impossible, it is all the more important, because the effect of
the story depends on a presumed need for a judgement that we cannot
make. This model originates in the negative. It begins with the
20 M. CISCO
supernatural understood as what is excluded from the category of the

demonstrable, and then makes the typical genre story depend on what
judgement, if any, is made about this indemonstrable event. If there is no
call for a judgement, there is no tension, no effect, according to this
model. Todorov’s scheme is dialectic in that it privileges the ambiguous
story as a gateway to psychological fiction (and this is supposed to repre-
sent progress I suppose) which in turn makes the fantastic obsolete.
Todorov bases his definition on the supernatural, then turns aside the
question of the supernatural by changing the subject to psychology. For
no reason this psychological reading is treated as if it ruled out an episte-
mological reading, even though weird fiction’s particular domain of affect
is epistemological; in fact, weird fiction’s whole reason for being seems to
be the creation of epistemological affects. Todorov can’t really account for
the weirdness of weird fiction, except to say that it’s a primitive, pre-
Freudian way of trying to think about psychology. So if Todorov is right
and at least Victorian weird fiction is typified by an either/or—madness or
supernatural—we see no such distinction in Macbeth, or in any of the
other source material for Victorian weird fiction. How can there be shad-
ings of reality, or even of reason? Aren’t these either/or? How can there
be “and”? Reason and unreason at once, real and unreal at once? Weird
fiction tries to give us precisely this. Not one or the other, as Todorov
would have it, but both and neither.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote that tragedy is the fact that
anything can be affirmed, even two contradictory things at once.15 Not
one or the other, but both, because life is bigger than just one or just the
other. If we follow the ambiguous definition of the fantastic as Todorov
has it, then we cannot account for The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley
Jackson; the novel can be classified easily enough as marvellous, since the
reality of the haunting is bluntly asserted from the beginning, but there is
consequently nothing whatever at stake in the judgement respecting the
reality of the supernatural. That stake is simply dispensed with by Jackson,
making the judgement of supernatural activity entirely beside the point.
Nor is the supernatural aspect of the story merely an adjunct to a more
important psychological portrait of Eleanor Vance. Hill House is a charac-
ter, a kind of demon psychoanalyst, who manipulates Eleanor using her
own neuroses. The aim in weird fiction must be this broader view, which
makes life something primal, the ground from which structures are drawn,
and not a structure itself.
This goes further than presenting everything we are supposed to reject,

only in order that we may reaffirm ourselves by repeating the gesture of
rejecting it again. If that were all weird fiction did, then it would still be
under the sway of what it was not. Todorov would be right; there would
be no weird fiction, only bad psychological fiction. However, weird fiction
does more than this; it begins with an affirmation of the greater scope of
experience and then moves to a negation of limitations to experience, in
order to affirm a boundless horizon.
***
Major literatures compete with each other to the extent that they are
major. Minor literature originates within its major regime, but escapes it.
In weird fiction, we could say that the minor story is the weird tale of radi-
cal epistemological doubt, the kind that undermines any sense of solid
reality, but then there is actually nothing to prevent the reactionary majori-
tarian forces in society from making use of the same kind of doubt. The
doubt is not what makes the story minor. Very often, the epistemologi-
cally sceptical weird tale walks back its challenges by receding into a valida-
tion of bland conventionality, almost always with the same fucking quote
from Hamlet, you know the one, about there being more things. This
maintains an appearance of sceptical uncertainty, but it amounts to saying
that we might as well rely on the usual verities, rather than go off on wild
goose chases looking for new ones that will be no more reliable. Klossowski
will call this “easy-going agnosticism”16 and there’s nothing radical or
interesting about it. The story of posthumous justice, for its part, is no
more necessarily major than the sceptical story is necessarily minor.
Labelling of stories like “Grayling; or Murder Will Out” as conservative
means flirting with a problem. The idea of a moral universe may be inte-
gral to a certain status quo, but it also makes that status quo vulnerable to
moral critique. The shear between theory and practice in the application
of the idea is a virtual transformation point. Kafka wrote stories of minor-
ity justice, set within the virtual transformation point, all the time, that
justice being a justice that generates verdicts which are in turn only new
beginnings. The destruction of Dracula is a major judgement in the novel,
but a minor judgement, which is to say a kind of tragedy, in the Frank
Langella film.
The basis for the opposition lies in the idea that the major story recruits
the ghost to act as a mere cypher for the self-serving “justice” of human
22 M. CISCO
ruling classes, but justice is too important an idea to cede entirely to the
major. Is the epistemological story also a story of justice? Insofar as the
epistemological story, by insisting on an open conception of experience,
cautions us when it comes to judgement? Do we abandon judgement, or
only bad judgements? Is abandoning judgement itself a judgement? Just
because the weird doesn’t depend on the making of a judgement, that
doesn’t mean that judgement isn’t involved at all (Wilde says that moral-
ity is involved in art, but only insofar as art shows us people thinking
about morality, the art itself being neither moral nor immoral).17 And, if
a more nuanced idea of judgement is better, isn’t it better because it is
more just? The properly mourned dead are truly dead, because they more
or less disappear from our experience in life; we may gaze on their like-
nesses, but these images are really no different from the noble abstrac-
tions of a hall of allegorical busts representing Statist ideological values
like industry or sobriety. Seen from this perspective, official mourning is a
second death for the dead, the death of our living image of someone,
replacing complex living changeable beings with idealized mannikins; it’s
a kind of ritual execution, which might call for a kind of justice that
explodes in the haunting. Then the scandal of the haunting as such
emerges, where the scandal is the rejection of the idealized image by the
dead themselves, and not the crimes of which they were the victims in life.
The restless dead are looking more like rebels who refuse to be silenced
by banishment or to be co-opted by praise (see, e.g., “We Are the Dead,”
by Henry Kuttner). The peaceful dead look a bit complacent and sad next
to these vigorous protester-ghosts!
Weird fiction walks a line with a conservative idea of a transcendent
moral order as an important instrument for maintaining a political status
quo on one side, and, on the other side, a radical idea of a cosmos that is
inherently inimical to any status quo. It would be stupid, though, to miss
the utility of the chaotic cosmos for a conservative status quo, or of the
idea of a transcendent moral order for the radical side. Radicals call on
eternal verities all the time, as Dr. King did, and conservatives have pointed
to cosmic chaos to validate the importance of invented stability, as
Lovecraft did. So the line weird fiction walks divides two tendencies in
thought, but each tendency is itself able to go in two directions.
With Nietzsche, Deleuze says judgement is priestly psychology, in that
it demands total revelation of the complete story.18 This means, the total-
ization of a story and the closing of all its boundaries. But Deleuze also
says, this time apropos of Kant’s third critique, that judgement can also
emerge as a masterstroke of reason in a form of free play that does not

seem to me to be able to coexist with the transcendence of total revelation.
Priestly judgement is levelling all to one identity; an identity that is created
by exhaustion, but this masterstroke judgement doesn’t seem to work like
that. It’s more like the establishment of an excellent connection between
things, rather than the isolation and categorization of a thing. In Nietzsche,
the creator of laws is substituted as the more life-affirming alternative to
the judge; which is to say that there is still a figure there with power, but
that power is creative. It doesn’t consist in reducing new events to types of
past precedents and so on, but continually reinvents the law, much as we
see in Kafka. So what might be emerging here is an idea of the judge as
one who reduces everything to a static arrangement on the one hand, and
the creator who participates in the transformations of events. Law in this
case becomes a negotiation, a contract, or bargain—a kind of minor law.
The weird tale asks us to recognize these contracts for what they are, by
speculating about the consequences of a discovery that nullifies those
contracts.
***
In a filmed interview, John Brunner defined genre as the repetition of an

audience: “if one looks back at the historical record it makes far better
sense to try and trace a continuity of an audience of this kind than it does
to try and trace some kind of literary genealogy in which a writer of one
generation specializing in or dabbling in marvel tales influenced directly a
writer of the following generation.”19 While readers don’t write contracts
for writers, they do decide which works within the marketing category of
a given genre belong to their own personal canons, and thus influence
sales and so on. This means that accounting for the production of a genre
has to include the audience; the audience makes the genre.
Genre is a contraction. For Bergson, the past is a contraction entailing
all those things we find already around us, so the past is what we experi-
ence as it is understood. The present, for Bergson, is the arrival of differ-
ence in contact with the past, and concentrated in the present are all the
mobile forces of change.20 The future is an expansion of possibilities
brought into being by the transformations of the present moment. If we
think of the time of literature, then genre would be something like a mem-
ory-image in which the contraction consists of a given canon of texts.
However, since there is no actual image in this case, and the term “image”
24 M. CISCO
in the phrase “memory-image” is concretely associated by Bergson with

images on a movie screen, a different term is called for here: “memory-
reading,” where reading is a noun understood to mean a constellation of
specific literary elements. Taking the typical definition of weird fiction, for
example, the memory-reading would constellate together ghosts, psychic
detectives, derelict mansions, and so on, but the memory-reading wouldn’t
be confined to lists of familiar tropes—the content of the reading wouldn’t
be determined by the type of content but by the distinguishing affects of
the genre.
The critic’s task can be a matter of justifying a given memory-reading
before a critical tribunal, but this begs the question of how the memory-
reading is compiled. Even where there is a preconceived idea of the con-
tent or the origin of a genre, the preconception remains to be accounted
for. This study will examine how the genre’s memory-reading combines
the supernatural, a concept of the bizarre, and a concept of destiny. Genre,
from this point of view, will function as a principle of individuation as
Gilbert Simondon described it:
that which the individuation makes appear is not only the individual, but
also the pair individual-environment. The individual is thus relative in two
senses, both because it is not all of the being, and because it is the result of
a state of the being in which it existed neither as individual, nor as principle
of individuation.21
When writers, readers, and critics bring together the elements of the
supernatural, the bizarre, and destiny, they produce weird fiction together
by means of the genre. The genre produces individual stories as well as
their “environment,” which is not only their audience or “theatre” but
also the creative climate that perpetuates the genre. As it stands in any
given moment, the genre does not cover all weird fiction, but only weird
fiction as it is being produced, and as it relates selectively to past weird fic-
tion. There is more in existence, namely the potentials for new weird tales.
These potentials come into being with and in both stories and audiences.
Stories introduce ideas and techniques which will be extended, challenged,
supplanted, in new stories. Audiences become ready for new materials in
time and make the repetition of the genre happen.
Notes
1. Derrida, Jacques, and Ronell, Avital. “The Law of Genre.” Critical
Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, (Autumn, 1980), pp. 55–81; page 56.
2. Ibid., page 80.
3. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; page 81.
4. “Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. On the
other hand, a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is
a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm pro-
duces silk, as the activity of his own nature. He later sold his product for £5
and thus became a merchant. But the literary proletarian of Leipzig who
produces books, such as compendia on political economy, at the behest of
his publisher is pretty nearly a productive worker since his production is
taken over by capital and only occurs in order to increase it. A singer who
sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her song for money,
she is to that extent a wage laborer or merchant. But if the same singer is
engaged by an entrepreneur who makes her sing to make money, then she
becomes a productive worker, since she produces capital directly”—Marx,
Karl. Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. London: New
Left Review, 1976; page 1044.
5. Frey, Renea. “The Law of Genre.” Devil or the Dictionary: Genre Theory
Adventures. Posted 2/16/12. URL: genretheoryannotations.word-
press.com.
6. Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge Press, 2002;
pages 15–16.
7. See Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” Modern Genre Theory. Ed.
David Duff. NY: Longman, 2000.
8. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Origin of Genres.” Modern Genre Theory. Ed.
David Duff. NY: Longman, 2000; page 18.
9. “the personal self requires God and the world in general. But when sub-
stantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names … are carried
away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events,
all identity disappears from the self, the world, and God. … For personal
uncertainty is not a doubt foreign to what is happening, but rather an
objective structure of the event itself”—Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1990; page 3.
10. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984; pages 129–130.
11. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Digireads, 2010; page 22.
26 M. CISCO
12. Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. New York: Zone Books,
2001; page 41.
13. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Complete Stories. New York: Modern Library
Classics, 2002; page 309.
14. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary
Genre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975; page 41.
15. See Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner.
New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
16. Klossowski, Pierre. Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. London: Continuum
Press, 2005; page 169.
17. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988;
page 347.
18. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays, Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997; page 130.
19. Brunner, John. “John Brunner Speaks: 1/2.” Uploaded by syfysucks,
5/14/10. URL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=00TouBRitR0.
20. Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011; page 102.
21. Simondon, Gilbert. “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis.”
Parrhesia vol. 7, (2009), pp. 4–16; page 5.
CHAPTER 2
The Supernatural
Where Fantasy introduces the supernatural as an aspect of another world,

and so tends to avoid the question of the supernatural in the reader’s
world, the purpose of weird fiction, on the other hand, is to produce the
supernatural in the reader’s world. Here, when I speak of the supernatural,
I mean a kind of infinite experience that challenges assumptions about the
nature of reality. This is an experience that does not involve any question
of the existence of supernatural beings or the supernatural character of
some effect or other. Weird fiction not only depicts bizarre events, it does
so in order to produce the supernatural as an experience for the reader,
and this experience is the whole point of the genre. This helps us to under-
stand how the genre comes about and how it endures. It responds to a
desire for escape from a trap, life understood as a composite of probabili-
ties, possibilities, reasoned and plotted out, predictable and stable. Weird
fiction has something to offer these desires, something that is not at all
vicarious, and which can lean towards the more major, solacing position,
which is that stability is possible in chaos, that stability will win in the end,
but the genre can also lean towards the more minor, unsettling idea that
stability is only an illusion born of our ignorance and fear.
***
In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov writes: “The fantastic … lasts only as

long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

Switzerland AG 2021
M. Cisco, Weird Fiction,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92450-8_2
28 M. CISCO
who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from a ‘reality’
as it exists in the common opinion. At the story’s end, the reader makes a
decision even if the character does not.”1 However, if reality is nothing
more than “common opinion,” then how can it have the stability that
seems to be entailed in the common uses of the term “reality”? Weird fic-
tion takes notice of this and uses it to create aesthetic effects. It will also
notice that “common ideas” are common because they are imposed. If, as
Todorov says, the fantastic only lives as long as this hesitation lives, then,
on the one hand, it will last forever, since there is no way to make a suffi-
ciently strong decision on such matters, or, rather, this hesitation can
never start, because it isn’t possible to hesitate when it comes to making
an impossible decision.
The weird tale exists to open the closed set of ordinary experience.
Wrangling over ontological permission is not the point of the weird tale,
which in practice makes brushing this question aside its most characteristic
and important gesture. The moment we begin to map the supernatural,
we are likely traversing a boundary or modal distinction into Fantasy, even
if the setting is a familiar, mundane one. If the ambiguity is important, it
is because it is a radical ambiguity, and this is why the possibility itself must
be supernatural.
When we speak of the supernatural, then, we have to be clear that this
means something that makes the idea of reality ambiguous, rather than
something that is of ambiguous reality. A distinction that presumes an
inherently stable reality entirely misses the point. The Fantastic suggests
we read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, purely psychologically
without accounting for the presence of the ghosts in the story and without
considering weird fiction’s epistemological implications, which, if taken
seriously, emphasize the impossibility of distinguishing between the mar-
vellous and the fantastic in experience, no matter how readily these two
options may be logically distinguished. The Fantastic can account for the
influence of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel by means of a psychologically
reductive reading, a more “realistic” reading, but this approach utterly
fails to explain why the influence should take the form of a ghostly haunt-
ing, as opposed to simply remembering and imitating. Todorov’s approach
also fails to see that the genre depends essentially on the way that logical
categorization sits on top of experience; we look for logic in experience,
but the logic we find remains descriptive, it doesn’t prompt the action. We
have experiences, not realities; or, we might say that reality is a generaliza-
tion from experiences. In a weird tale, the reader is under no obligation to
2 THE SUPERNATURAL 29
experience a logical conundrum, let alone render a considered opinion

about the existence of the supernatural, but the weird tale does, I insist,
have to produce in the reader a clear impression that experience is not
controlled by logic. This means at once that, however limited our possibili-
ties may seem to be when enumerated logically, other possibilities do exist.
This affirmation can be derived logically from the realization that our logi-
cal calculations of possibility all derive from given assumptions about our
circumstances, more or less articles of faith unless they are proven by other
arguments which themselves must be grounded in unproven givens, and
so on. This is why the weird tale must include supernatural tropes, because
it is through these means that it can home in on some of the most basic of
those assumptions, about for example the continuity of time and space, or
of natural laws. There is more food for logic in existence than logic alone
can account for, which affirms even logic as a perennial activity rather than
something that can exhaust truth and finalize itself once and for all. The
story goes to the limit in order to give us a taste of what it might be like
to escape possibility itself, understood as a kind of policing of our desires,
disguised as natural or automatic logic in a fetishistic way of thinking.
What is impossible is only impossible for persons, so it is therefore pos-
sible to experience the impossible if one ceases to be a person.
***
Three possibilities: the supernatural is definitely involved in the story

(marvellous), the supernatural is definitely ruled out (uncanny), or the
supernatural is an open question. These are spurious differences. The
supernatural is something that can only be asserted, never demonstrated.
For this reason, its non-existence cannot be directly proven any more than
its existence can. There may be any amount of circumstantial evidence rul-
ing out the supernatural, but that’s as far as we can go when it comes to
this question. So there really is no difference between these possibilities.
We can say that the supernatural is definitely asserted in one kind of story
and definitely rejected in another, while in some stories neither of these
things occurs, but just what is being asserted or rejected or left alone in
each case is always an open question. It is proximity to this openness that
the weird tale offers its readers.
Whenever a story introduces the supernatural, it produces the super-
natural as an experience of the limitless possibilities of experience itself in
distinction from the “common opinion.” How is reality derived from
30 M. CISCO
common opinion? On the contrary, common opinion is always wrong,

and reality is constantly blasting it to pieces.
Who says we “must decide”? Henry James? The author who made
every effort to insure that no decision could be made? Who is demanding
that reality be defined and settled in predictable and stable patterns and
relationships? What right do they have to demand that? What difference
does this decision about the story make to the story? And who, given a
supernatural possibility in a story, would insist that the story was not about
the supernatural? If, for example, we read a collection of William Hope
Hodgson’s stories detailing the adventures of his psychic detective,
Carnacki the Ghost Finder, some will involve actual hauntings, while oth-
ers, which seem to revolve around a supernatural event, turn out to be red
herrings. However, these nonsupernatural stories are only there to lend
greater credence to the supernatural ones, by showing us that Carnacki
isn’t a dupe or fanatic who insists on seeing ghosts where there are none.
However, for the duration of the deception, the story is as weird in its
affect as any story that does not debunk its supernatural content. Basically,
the red herring story is only there to further demonstrate the infinity of
possibilities as they arise in the other stories.
***
[P]sychoanalysis has replaced (and therefore has made useless) the literature
of the fantastic.2
Can a form of art be “replaced” and “made useless” by something else,

whether it be some other kind of art, or something that isn’t art at all?
Taking for granted the idea that psychoanalysis will necessarily debunk the
supernatural in the world that we readers live in, this suggests that this in
turn will make the literature of the fantastic unintelligible or hopelessly
quaint to us. Perhaps the sustained interest in the genre is a sign that psy-
choanalysis has been insufficiently well propagated in the world?
This brute-force approach to weird fiction is hopelessly impotent to
account for the decision by Henry James, author of numerous literary
works involving highly subtle and involved character psychology, to write
The Turn of the Screw instead of a work of fiction on the same theme with-
out any supernatural references. It’s almost as if James needed the idea of
haunting spirits to arrive at his psychological portrait of the Governess. In
The Haunting of Hill House, there is no “replacement” of the genuine

haunting with the equally genuine psychological portrait of Eleanor Vance,
nor does the psychological consistency of that portrait make the super-
natural element in the story “useless.”
The supernatural cannot be replaced with psychology, not only because
they so often coexist in weird fiction and elsewhere but also because they
plainly have different literary roles to play. No amount of insanity can
account for the basic lability of our experience of reality. While there is a
psychology of the supernatural, this doesn’t replace the supernatural any
more than any other logical schematic replaces what it models. The inter-
est in the supernatural, I have contended, is rooted in a desire for freedom
from the constraints of experience, a desire that is susceptible to psycho-
analysis, but this does not replace the literature of the supernatural any
more than it replaces any other form of literature. Psychology itself is
another set of potentially arbitrary limitations on experience, at least as it
is commonly practiced, which may contribute to a desire for a supernatural
escape from psychology’s limitations.
Todorov’s argument is stupid. It amounts to saying that understanding
desire somehow limits or controls it, which makes about as much sense as
suggesting that authors of weird fiction begin with critical treatises on the
subject and write their fiction according to the findings of critics.
***
In weird fiction, two concepts interact to produce a “local” supernatural-

ism. Those two concepts are the bizarre and destiny. They are not super-
natural concepts, but rather they produce the supernatural as a virtuality
that the weird tale makes actual, that is, an actual challenge to the solidity
of identity, reality, and the world. The bizarre event decouples the one
who encounters it from whatever is considered natural or normal, and the
weird narrative that includes this bizarre event and its aftermath all unfolds
as a destiny. A character is marked and that character will thenceforth bear
the destiny to change. So, rather than starting from an idea of the super-
natural, the weird tale begins with the bizarre, through it finds a destiny,
and so results in the production of the supernatural. The weird tale there-
fore does not affect the reader as an illustration of a familiar religious or
metaphysical representation of life or the world would but rather as a
shocking departure from familiarity as such.
32 M. CISCO
Readers of weird fiction are constantly encountering passages like this

one, excerpted from the title story of Gerald Bullett’s collection, The Street
of the Eye:
[T]he supernatural story, as I say, is something of a test. Tell a group of new

acquaintances some fairly well authenticated ghost-story, and they will fall
apart and regroup in their special classes like a company of soldiers forming
up into platoons. There will be the credulous fools on the one hand, ready
to believe anything without question; there will be the materialist fools on
the other hand, snorting in angry contempt. Between the two—truth is
generally found midway between extremes—between the two, preserving a
delicate balance between scepticism and credulity, doubting the story, per-
haps, but admitting the possibility, will be the wise men.3
Remembering Claire Colebrook’s definition of concepts as extremes,4 we

can see immediately that Bullett’s so-called wise men have no concepts.
They think in averages and avoid extremes, according to an unexamined a
priori principle, embodying Klossowski’s “easy-going agnosticism.”5
Here’s another example, this one from William Hope Hodgson’s story,
“The Thing Invisible.” The speaker is Carnacki the Ghost Finder:
I am as big a skeptic concerning the truth of ghost tales as any man you are
likely to meet; only I am what I might term an unprejudiced skeptic. I am
not given to either believing or disbelieving things “on principle,” as I have
found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed
to boast of the insane fact. I view all reported “hauntings” as unproven until
I have examined into them, and I am bound to admit that ninety-nine cases
in a hundred turn out to be sheer bosh and fancy. But the hundredth!6
It is little wonder that the middle-way wisdom of the former quote should
superficially appear to be the key to understanding the genre. But even if
the stories don’t really engage with the problem implicit in this scepticism,
they do raise it consistently. Hodgson’s ghost finder is the more a poste-
riori thinker, in comparison with Bullett’s smug narrator; so we find both
angles under review in weird fiction. This is a problem in the Deleuzian
sense of the word, which is to say an aspect of a concept.7
Taking this into account, weird fiction will often make the lack of a
discernible choice between the supernatural and the natural itself super-
natural, so that “suspending judgement” amounts to the same thing as a
selection of the supernatural interpretation. Admitting the possibility of

the supernatural is already enough. William James wrote “a universal
proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance. If you wish to
upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn’t seek to show that no
crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”8 Should
any consistent supernaturalism appear in the story, however, it would begin
to blur over into Fantasy; so weird fiction must be making a provisional
claim about the reader’s reality as such, and not just with respect to some
detail or other, while Fantasy falls more solidly on the provision of a condi-
tion that is patently unreal, but transposed to another world. If an under-
standing of the supernatural is what is wanted, rather than familiarity with
what is typically thought of as being supernatural (which would only be a
list of tropes), then a concept of the supernatural is required. But no con-
cept can be extracted from the lazy neutrality of “wise men” as Bullett
describes them.9
What Deleuze and Guattari call a concept is the product of philosophy,
distinguished from percepts, which are produced by art, and propositions
or models, which are produced by science (see What Is Philosophy?).
Concepts are dynamic, immanent consistencies, rather than transcendent
categories imposed on reality. The idea of the supernatural may be tran-
scendent, may even be transcendence itself, but an immanent concept of
the supernatural is also possible, and, what’s more, it can be found at work
in the production of weird fiction as the result of a radical challenge to
reality by experience.
The discovery of an atrocity may challenge our idea of history or cause
us to give certain events a different weight, a different causal background.
However, it also can induce a sense of unreality that cannot really be
accounted for by resistance alone; it isn’t a refusal to believe, but an inabil-
ity to establish links between an extant idea of reality and the atrocity. In
his Ethics, Spinoza describes the emotion of wonder precisely in terms of
this unrelatedness.
Wonder is an imagination of a thing in which the Mind remains fixed because

this singular imagination has no connection with the others … the Mind,
from considering one thing, immediately passes to the thought of another—
because the images of these things are connected with one another, and so
ordered that one follows the other. This concept, of course, cannot be con-
ceived when the image of the thing is new.10
34 M. CISCO
This is not an affect for Spinoza, because it is merely the absence of any
impetus to move on to another thought, so the Mind is in suspense until
something familiar presents itself. However, this is not a “hesitation,”
because there is no decision to be made. The new, strange event, the
bizarre, expands the domain of experience by introducing something new.
It is desired by those who want the new. If it is comprehensible, such that
an analyst could anticipate it according to psychoanalytic theory, then it
isn’t new.
The feeling of unreality arises when experience goes beyond the arbi-
trary limits of reality, that “common opinion” that Todorov writes about.
To watch as our reality changes is to recognize that it is in flux. Todorov
is correct insofar as he identifies ambivalence to be an important aspect of
weird fiction, but his is only a logical ambivalence about the existence or
inexistence of an abstraction; the ambivalence of weird fiction has more to
do with the mixed horror and attraction with which people experience
becoming, an encounter with the new in familiar everyday places. It is the
ambivalence of the experience of fear itself, fear in an ordinary setting. The
supernatural cannot account for becoming—nothing can; there is no way
to make decisions about the unknown. Rather the supernatural is a con-
frontation with becoming as a problem for the mundane, of experience as
a problem for reality.
The mundane must account for all becomings, all changes. The “com-
mon opinion” must be an average of all experiences. The disconnected-
ness of the bizarre event produces the supernatural, not as an alternative
accounting system, but as the repetition of that disconnection; in other
words, the self-difference of reality, which is the only constant.
***
A supposedly impossible event arises out of the uncertainty of becoming

and so points back to that uncertainty as an aspect of all becomings. The
event in question is so bizarre, so apparently unconnected to any other,
the consequences of its being what it seems to be are so dire, that the
uncertainty which it otherwise would share with any other event itself
becomes threatening. Hume pointed out that, while the sequence of
events is perceptible, causality per se is not.
We have said, that all arguments concerning existence are founded on the
relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived
entirely from experience; and that all our experimental conclusions proceed
upon the supposition, that the future will be conformable to the past. To
endeavour, therefore, the proof of this last proposition by probable argu-
ments, or arguments regarding existence, must be evidently going in a cir-
cle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question.11
That one thing follows another can be perceived, albeit with the assistance
of a contraction of moments in the memory, but to perceive this is not to
perceive causation, which must be inferred from perceived sequences. One
of the challenges writers of weird fiction often face is the creation of an
event that is perceptibly anomalous, disconnected in Spinoza’s sense, con-
sidered apart from any simple cause for alarm.
An approach to weird fiction implying that the supernatural should be
understood as a category of indemonstrable scientific propositions, and/or
as a crude preliminary approach to a more scientifically psychological fic-
tion, would eliminate the key distinction between weird fiction and science
fiction. Science fiction creates art by experimenting with the percepts asso-
ciated with propositions; Fantasy fiction goes yet another way, using per-
cepts to formulate propositions and then to develop a world from them. As
for psychology, the question of the observer’s sanity, that is, whether or not
the witness of the supernatural event is hallucinating, does not generally
take into account the Romantic tendency of weird fiction to present mad-
ness as a form of higher perception. The Romantic problem of insanity
always has more to do with disobedience and forbidden knowledge than
misunderstanding.
In weird fiction, the supernatural is not a proposition. Deleuze derides
as “infantile” the positivist tendency to measure concepts “against a ‘phil-
osophical’ grammar that replaces them with propositions extracted from
the sentences in which they appear. We are constantly trapped between
alternative propositions and do not see that the concept has already passed
into the excluded middle. The concept is not a proposition at all.”12 The
excluded middle has nothing to do with the namby-pamby middle way of
the passage from Bullett quoted above. It refers to any relation of mere
negation, such as the typical one dividing the supernatural from the natu-
ral. Passing into the excluded middle means discovering a non-negative
relationship between logical contraries. If the supernatural is a heretofore
unknown aspect of nature, then it is just an aspect of nature that hasn’t yet
been properly understood. That makes it a virtual proposition. Hence the
supernatural is negated, ceasing to be anything on its own, if we take this
36 M. CISCO
as a given. Weird fiction often extracts a thrill from the reversal of this
negation, so that the supernatural negates the natural instead. A super-
natural experience is then supposed to expose the natural order as an illu-
sion arising from hubristic overconfidence in human reason, unnoticed
limitations to human sense capacities, wishful thinking that is naive and
complacent, or just stupidity. The human coding of nature is shown to be
a local artefact, much like human social values. Often in weird fiction,
nature as a reliably predictable causality is negated, but the supernatural
typically has no independent existence apart from this negation; it appears
as a positive element not in its relationship to nature, but in the produc-
tion of an open-endedness in experience. Where the supernatural appears
as a usurping causality, it negates nature and becomes the new nature,
negating itself as supernatural here as well by simply altering the limita-
tions to experience instead of opening them. So, as a positive element in
the story, the supernatural is weird fiction’s product.
***
What relationship is there between the supernatural of weird fiction and

the religious supernatural?
Religion recruits the supernatural, encoding it, and elaborating it
within codes. Historically, western Christianity, which has the most direct
influence on weird fiction to date, has always been thoroughly ambivalent
about the supernatural in a way that does not involve a strict separation of
natural and supernatural, nor any effective uncertainty about the possibil-
ity of the supernatural, making it a “lawful” intervention in the natural
order by the monarchical God who created that order.
Weird fiction is a nineteenth-century extension of Gothic fiction, with
its major mode—a pro-Enlightenment, anti-Catholic one which turns
superstition into entertainment—and its minor mode, counterinformation
to the sweeping rationalism of the Enlightenment, which it often tacitly or
explicitly condemns as hubris a warning against the reconstitution of a
new set of rigid parameters for experience. The prevailing tendency in
weird fiction is towards the production of the supernatural without any
clear link to religion.
European and American religious establishments monopolize the
supernatural and confine it to sanctioned expressions that connect the
supernatural as a concept with morality and with the institutional power of
the church. This does away with Spinozan wonder, since the supernatural
event will then appear in connection with dogma. The disconnected

supernatural of weird fiction arises, in part, as an answer to this. The effect
of disconnecting, right before the reader’s eyes, the supernatural from
dogma is a bizarre event, given the expectations of an audience raised with
a conventional religious education, just as the disconnection from scien-
tific cause and effect will be bizarre to those who misconceive science as
another version of religion.
This disconnection is plausible due to an ambivalence found in Plato.
The mystical transcendence and cosmic unity of Plato’s empyrean was
inherent in reason, rather than in charismatic authority. This means Plato
allowed for a kind of “freelance” relation to the divine which, while it
could be (and was) appropriated by an institution like the church when it
came to extending rationalistic claims for theology, it could also under-
mine church authority insofar as it required all positions taken to be con-
sistent and set forth the idea that oneness with the divine could arise
without official permission. With respect to supernatural folklore and so
on, the church was compelled to struggle for mastery of unseen forces and
powerful symbols, employing a range of strategies from co-optation of
sacred places and holidays, to the appropriation of gods and spirits in sub-
ordinated forms (demons, angels, and saints), to the outright suppression
of folk religions and speculative experimentation alike. The ambivalence
about the supernatural took the form of uncertainty regarding its prove-
nance, since the devil had to be put to work accounting for all rogue
usages of the supernatural. This ambivalence persists right through to
Kant (see Kant’s remarks on miracles, e.g., in Religion Within the Limits of
Reason Alone).
The supernatural of Dante’s Divine Comedy is a feature of a vertical
cosmic structure with God at its summit and Satan at its base. There are
inconsistencies, however; Dante is a poet, and so not exactly authorized to
speak about the divine. His guide is a virtuous pagan at first, then Beatrice
Portinari, who likewise is without portfolio from the church. However,
the overall effect—particularly for later generations—is to affirm Catholic
doctrine from parallel sources, as if the official truth were impossible to
avoid for any seeker of truth. The supernaturalism of the Divine Comedy is
not meaningfully differentiated from Christian dogma of its time, which is
why it really cannot be called weird fiction.
However, by the nineteenth century, when weird fiction really comes
into its own, the supernatural had already long since acquired another
existence, separate from dogma of any kind, and had become much more
38 M. CISCO
horizontal, which is to say that the supernatural becomes the “beyond”

for rational knowledge, a receding frontier, rather than a form of true but
inaccessible divine knowledge. It’s as if the mystery that had at one time
cowled the truth of religion had been hollowed out, evacuated, and left
standing by itself. Infinity oscillates between being an attribute of God and
the absence of God. As this takes place, the supernatural, rather than van-
ish altogether, endures into the nineteenth century as the unassimilable
product of the bizarre experience. The supernatural comes to be thought
of as “out there,” rather than above and below. It is less and less hidden or
forbidden, and more and more simply out of sight, just over the horizon.
Morally didactic supernatural stories, like “Grayling,” persist, but the con-
nection between morality and the supernatural is no longer taken for
granted, and the connection between even the moral supernatural and
Christianity is largely soft-pedalled, or left to be inferred. Dickens’ story
“The Signal-Man” has none of the moral uplift of “A Christmas Carol.” If
there is a Christian God in “The Signal-Man,” He is unable to make any
strong or clear impression on a modern man, a student of natural philoso-
phy, but can only very faintly and imperfectly hint at what is to come,
leaving his correspondent to ponder rationally on the meaning of those
hints. Even in “A Christmas Carol,” the spirits, which are not designated
in any specifically Christian way apart from their association with the holi-
day, and which have attributes derived from folklore, pagan imagery, and
the accounts of early spiritualists or ghost-seers, corroborate Christian
ideas as it were from elsewhere. They are not direct emissaries of God.
This change in the character of the supernatural must have come about
for a variety of reasons, but one of them could be the way Descartes’ radi-
cal doubt separates the mysteries of existence from the religious faith that
was supposed to ground them, dramatizing in a hybrid way the sort of
stark relationship between man and the unknown that will be presented
more unilaterally by later thinkers. Descartes leaves us only with a confi-
dence that God’s goodness is sufficiently reliable, but beyond the reach of
any direct proof. The supernatural becomes the domain of radical doubt
concerning the nature of existence, allowing radical doubt to adopt a new
form, and showing us the world as this point of view must have it.
From Descartes through Locke, Hume, and Kant, it is possible to trace
the development of a certain line of thinking touching on the supernatu-
ral, if not specifically dedicated to explaining it. This timeline of thinkers is
immanent to the supernatural because these thinkers are in explicit con-
versation with each other. Even Descartes, insofar as he strove successfully
to be an inaugurator of a new kind of critical philosophy, sets himself into

position; he is not arbitrarily placed at the beginning of this line of think-
ing merely out of some unexamined academic habit or for convenience.
Locke’s thinking touches on the supernatural by centring thought on
experience. Much of what Deleuze refers to generally as “the image of
thought” was most influentially propagated by Locke in English-speaking
countries13; that is, the idea that thought arises from a disinterested and
individual will to truth. This is the air of rarefied and altruistic inquiry into
the nature of reality that recurs throughout weird fiction; Ambrose, the
reclusive urban mystic in Arthur Machen’s “The White People,” Algernon
Blackwood’s mystic seekers, Lovecraft’s stoic uncoverers of hidden hor-
rors, and Shirley Jackson’s Dr. Montague are all suffused by this atmo-
sphere. Weird fiction is moreover typically built around the solitary
individual who, cut off from institutions and thrown onto their own
resources exclusively, confronts an event that seems to belong to what lies
beyond the outer limit of human understanding. Seen from this point of
view, it might not be too much to call weird fiction a basically Lockean
genre, even taking his avowed materialism into consideration; in fact, such
a designation would only be in keeping with Locke’s intellectual ubiquity
in the US and in English philosophy. “[T]here being many things, wherein
we have very imperfect notions, or none at all; and other things, of whose
past, present, or future existence, by the natural use of our faculties, we
can have no knowledge at all; these, as being beyond the discovery of our
natural faculties, and above reason, are, when revealed, the proper matter
of faith.”14 The post-Enlightenment idea of the supernatural introduces
dialectically a domain intervening between these two poles, faith and rea-
son, by reterritorializing a domain of scepticism which acts as a simula-
crum to both alternatives. That is, it is a supernatural domain, one which
can be explored rationally but not understood, and believed in without
having any direct link to religious faith.
Arguably the most important idea for understanding the universe scien-
tifically is causality. Hume, however, throws causality into doubt.
Therefore, there is no soundly rational way, according to Hume, to dis-
miss the supernatural event as an illusion, but more importantly, causal
systems that make up the scientific understanding of the world, however
consistent they may be, can never really be “nature” for human beings.
People will always experience nature as something only putatively causal,
according to Hume. This is the opening that admits the bizarre experience.
40 M. CISCO
Gothic fiction does not arise as a response to the radical uncertainty of

Hume, but instead seems to emerge out of a sense that the rational
Lockean idea of the cosmos was turning out to be unacceptably limited.
Certainly, dogma was taking its revenge on Locke and other thinkers too.
That suffocating feeling of impossibility, intolerably confining a fierce
desire for higher intensities of experience and discovery—Coleridge was
the standard bearer for that kind of boredom—is a key element of
Romanticism as well as Gothicism. There is a discrepancy between the
extensive fantasies of a vivid imagination and the everyday, which can
become acutely painful when all possibility of realization is dismissed out
of hand. The disconnectedness of the fantasy from real possibilities
becomes acutely painful in this time period of the mid- to late 1700s. It’s
as if what had formerly been a Christian hope for an infinite future, guar-
anteed by an infinitely connected plan, had to find another infinite outlet
for itself, but was baulked by science at every turn. While the arguments of
Hume didn’t give rise to the Gothic, such arguments as he made were
used to justify and understand a reorientation towards the imaginative that
had already been taken. This would eventually lead to a discovery of the
will as a problematic companion to the reason, in other words, to
Romanticism.
***
Kant undertook to address Hume’s scepticism, although, as Salomon

Maimon pointed out, he did not really manage to rebut Hume. He strives
to establish causality as a fundamentally immanent attribute of experience,
but he cannot do more than make it a logical necessity. Kant challenges
Hume’s denotation of the imagination as the faculty that produces ideas,
and Kant’s philosophy plainly segregates and neutralizes the imagination.
According to Deleuze,15 in the three critiques there are three different
schemes involving the three different Kantian mental faculties. In pure
reason, which produces empirical knowledge, the understanding legislates
to the reason and the imagination. In practical reason, which is moral, the
reason legislates to the understanding and the imagination. Given this
apparent rotation among the mental faculties, one might expect judge-
ment, the last procedure, to involve the legislation of the imagination to
the other two faculties, but instead Kant describes judgement in the third
critique as the free play of all three faculties without legislation. In no case
does the imagination legislate to the reason or the understanding; it is at
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L’arrivée à Panama présente un aspect assez agréable, à cause
de la puissante végétation répandue sur toute la côte et sur les îles
détachées qui ferment la rade du côté de l’ouest. Le terrain est
fortement ondulé ; la ville, construite sur un promontoire, avec ses
vieux murs en ruine, escaladés par des arbustes d’un vert éclatant, a
une apparence pittoresque, et pendant que la Junon s’avançait
lentement pour laisser tomber l’ancre aussi près que possible de la
plage, nous accusions les récits de nos prédécesseurs, qui
représentent Panama comme un lieu désolé et insupportable.
Nous fûmes un peu surpris de trouver cette magnifique rade
presque déserte ; deux navires de guerre, l’un américain, l’autre
anglais, et un paquebot de la ligne de San-Francisco, tous trois
mouillés près des îles, étaient nos seuls compagnons.
Après un long voyage en canot à vapeur (car les grands navires
ne peuvent approcher à moins de trois milles) et un débarquement
assez laborieux sur les épaules de nos canotiers, nous avons mis
pied à terre. Là, notre désillusion devint complète : vilaines rues,
vilaines maisons, mauvaise odeur, point d’animation, tout un quartier
brûlé, laissant voir des intérieurs jonchés de briques et de ferrailles
tordues. Voilà ce qu’aux rayons d’un soleil vertical nous laissa voir
cette ville, dont le nom retentissant est plus connu que celui de bien
des capitales.
Un examen plus complet ne détruisit pas la fâcheuse impression
produite par le premier. Panama semble une ville qui se meurt. Tout
ce qui a été construit sérieusement et solidement, remparts, églises,
maisons privées, est en ruine. J’en excepte les habitations de
quelques négociants et le Grand-Hôtel, édifice confortable, où
semble concentré tout ce qui reste d’existence dans ce lieu si
célèbre et si peu vivant aujourd’hui. La salle du rez-de-chaussée du
Grand-Hôtel, installée comme un bar des États-Unis, est, aux heures
brûlantes de la journée, le rendez-vous des gens d’affaires ainsi que
des désœuvrés ; les uns et les autres y absorbent sans discontinuer
d’excellents cock-tails glacés, et parfois avec une telle persévérance
qu’ils ont toutes les peines du monde à regagner leurs domiciles
respectifs. Mais ici cela est passé dans les usages, et il n’est pas de
bon goût d’y prêter la moindre attention.
N’ayant rien de mieux à faire que d’attendre patiemment le
départ de l’Acapulco, partant dans trois jours pour New-York, je me
mis en quête de renseignements sur ce pays, peu intéressant par
lui-même, mais auquel sa situation géographique donne une
importance considérable.
Le Panama que nous avions sous les yeux, malgré son air de
vétusté, n’est pas le vieux Panama fondé au temps de la conquête.
Celui-là était à douze kilomètres de la ville actuelle. Il fut brûlé et
pillé, il y a plus de deux siècles, par une bande de flibustiers,
commandés par un Anglais nommé Morgan. Le procédé qu’ils
employèrent pour se rendre maîtres de la ville est des plus simples ;
ayant débarqué sur la côte de l’Atlantique, au nombre d’environ cent
trente, ils traversèrent l’isthme et s’en vinrent camper sur les
hauteurs, où ils allumèrent un grand nombre de feux. Les habitants,
croyant avoir affaire à toute une armée, s’enfuirent, laissant la ville à
la merci de ces gredins.
Une dame espagnole fort riche possédait alors une vaste
propriété qui s’élevait à l’endroit où est maintenant la place Santa-
Anna ; une grande partie des fuyards alla se réfugier chez elle ; on
leur donna asile, et ils se mirent en demeure de rebâtir leurs
habitations au lieu où ils se trouvaient.
Ainsi fut fondé le nouveau Panama, dont l’emplacement se
trouva, d’ailleurs, bien mieux choisi et plus facile à mettre à l’abri de
toute surprise. Ce qui reste des anciennes constructions prouve que
la ville était autrefois très prospère. Tout le trafic de la partie
occidentale des deux Amériques passait alors à Panama.
L’établissement du chemin de fer de New-York à San-Francisco et la
création de la ligne anglaise de vapeurs qui, par l’Atlantique et le
détroit de Magellan, dessert les côtes du Chili et du Pérou, ont
enlevé à Panama la plus grande partie de son commerce.
Il y a bien une compagnie américaine, la Pacific Mail, qui fait le
service de New-York à San-Francisco par l’Isthme, mais cette
compagnie, liée intimement à celle du chemin de fer de l’Isthme
(Panama Railroad Company, également américaine), a pris ses
mesures de façon que marchandises et voyageurs passent presque
sans s’arrêter de bateau en chemin de fer et de chemin de fer en
bateau, de sorte que Panama est un peu comme la maison d’un
garde-barrière placée au bout d’un tunnel. Elle a le plaisir de voir
passer le train.
L’espoir, — je ne serai pas assez cruel pour dire : le rêve, — des

gens de Panama, est de voir le canal interocéanique aboutir dans
leur rade, et alors Panama retrouvera une splendeur plus grande
que jamais ; ce sera l’âge d’or, plus l’or.
Il ne m’appartient pas de décider sur une aussi grave question,
mais elle est trop intéressante pour que je n’en dise rien. Me plaçant
au point de vue des Panaméniens, je décomposerai le problème
comme suit :
1o Y aura-t-il un canal interocéanique, c’est-à-dire un passage
permettant aux grands navires de se rendre de l’Atlantique dans le
Pacifique, ainsi que, grâce à M. de Lesseps, ils se rendent
aujourd’hui de la Méditerranée dans l’océan Indien ?
2o Si ce canal est exécuté, aboutira-t-il à Panama ?
3o S’il aboutit à Panama, cette ville redeviendra-t-elle un centre
actif de commerce et d’affaires, rival de New-York, de Liverpool ou
du Havre ?
Pour la satisfaction des Colombiens, il faudrait que ces trois
questions fussent résolues affirmativement. Le seront-elles ainsi ?
J’admets volontiers que, sans être trop hardi, on peut répondre oui à
la première ; mais pour rester dans les limites de la prudence, on
devrait se borner à répondre peut-être à la seconde et bien douteux
à la troisième.
L’opinion, à Panama, semble tout au rebours de ce que je viens
de dire. On n’y est pas très convaincu que le canal soit jamais
percé ; mais s’il l’est, c’est à Panama qu’il devra aboutir évidemment,
et bien plus évidemment encore, d’après les gens d’ici, ce sera la
fortune du pays, de ses habitants, etc., etc…
Maintenant examinons. Et d’abord, qu’il soit bien entendu que je
parle au point de vue des gens du monde, laissant les questions
purement techniques de côté, admettant l’exactitude approximative
des études sérieuses déjà faites, et surtout que je décline la ridicule
prétention d’apporter le concours de mes lumières à ceux qui
poursuivent la solution de ce difficile problème.
Je crois que le canal interocéanique sera exécuté. Cela ne fait
même aucun doute dans mon esprit, parce que la possibilité de son
exécution est aujourd’hui démontrée, et que, d’autre part, les
avantages du percement de l’isthme américain sont immenses et
incontestés ; plus grands même, sinon plus immédiats, que ceux du
percement de l’isthme de Suez, étant donné que les navires à voiles
utiliseront un canal débouchant dans le Pacifique et ne peuvent
utiliser celui qui débouche dans la mer Rouge, dont la navigation est
pour eux pleine de lenteurs et de dangers.
Panama sera alors à 1,500 lieues marines de la Manche, au lieu
d’en être à 4,250 lieues ; c’est donc une économie de près de 3,000
lieues de route ; Panama se trouvant entre l’Amérique du Sud et
l’Amérique du Nord, cette économie de 3,000 lieues sera donc
l’économie moyenne de route que la traversée par le canal aura fait
gagner aux navires qui se rendent d’Europe dans l’un des ports des
côtes occidentales du continent américain.
De là résultera qu’un même navire, voilier ou vapeur, fera deux
voyages dans le temps qu’il eût mis à en faire un seul ; donc
abaissement du fret et du taux des assurances, importation en
Europe des produits du sol américain de l’ouest, trafic plus
abondant, émigration plus facile, extension des marchés, ouverture
de débouchés nouveaux…
Telles seront les heureuses conséquences de l’établissement du
canal interocéanique. Des impossibilités matérielles ou financières
pouvaient seules faire reculer ses promoteurs. Or, les travaux des
dernières expéditions ont prouvé qu’aucune impossibilité matérielle
n’existait, et maintenant que les devis ont pu être faits avec soin, les
statistiques exactement établies, on sait à quoi s’en tenir sur le prix
de l’exécution, sur les dépenses d’entretien et sur l’importance du
mouvement de transit.
Ceci n’étant pas une étude, mais un simple aperçu, je ne citerai
que trois chiffres qu’on peut considérer comme de prudentes
moyennes :
Prix de la construction du canal : 600 millions de francs ;
Entretien et frais d’exploitation annuels : 3 à 4 millions ;
Revenu annuel brut du canal : 70 à 80 millions [11] .
[11] Ces appréciations ont été pleinement vérifiées par
les études du congrès international du canal
interocéanique, réuni à Paris au mois de mai 1879.
Ce congrès a désigné le tracé par Colon et Panama,
comme devant être adopté.
Sans chercher à démontrer, ce qui serait facile, que pendant

plusieurs années au moins les recettes s’accroîtront plus rapidement
que celles du canal de Suez, on voit que rien ne s’oppose à
l’exécution de cette grande œuvre. Il ne s’agit plus que de savoir où
sera faite la gigantesque coupure que le génie du vieux continent va
tailler à la surface du nouveau.
La principale ou, pour mieux dire, la seule difficulté sérieuse du
percement de l’isthme américain ne réside pas dans la longueur du
canal, car la moyenne des tracés proposés dans la partie étroite est
de 70 kilomètres, tandis que le canal de Suez n’en a pas moins de
164.
L’obstacle est dans l’inégalité du terrain, et il faudra, croit-on,
tourner cet obstacle en construisant des écluses, ou le franchir en
creusant des tunnels dans lesquels devront passer les navires.
Parmi les nombreux tracés étudiés, il n’y en a aucun qui ne
comporte l’un ou l’autre de ce genre de travaux ; parfois ils les
exigent tous deux.
La description de ces divers projets, dont je ne connais d’ailleurs
que les dispositions générales, n’aurait d’intérêt que si je pouvais les
faire suivre d’un examen comparé, lequel est hors de ma
compétence.
Je me bornerai à signaler, comme classé parmi les plus sérieux,
celui qui a été récemment étudié par une commission internationale
sous les ordres des lieutenants de vaisseau français Wyse et Reclus
et dont faisait partie M. Sosa, ingénieur, représentant le
gouvernement colombien, que nous avons eu le plaisir de voir à
Panama. Ce projet ne comporte qu’un seul tunnel d’une longueur
d’environ six kilomètres, et on estime même que la tranchée pourrait
être faite à ciel ouvert moyennant une dépense supplémentaire de
50 millions ; il ne nécessite la construction d’aucune écluse et
suivant à très peu près la voie du chemin de fer actuellement
construite, vient aboutir à la rade de Panama. Tous les autres tracés
comprenant un plus long tunnel ou un nombre considérable
d’écluses, on voit que les Panaméniens, s’ils ne sont pas aussi sûrs
de leur fait qu’ils le croient, ont au moins des chances sérieuses de
voir une partie de leurs désirs réalisés.
Je dis « une partie de leurs désirs », car je crains bien que, même
passant à Panama, le canal interocéanique ne donne pas à ce port
abandonné beaucoup plus d’importance qu’il n’en a aujourd’hui.
Assurément, malgré les efforts que ne manquera pas de faire la
Compagnie du canal pour assurer elle-même ses
approvisionnements de toute nature, un mouvement considérable
animera l’isthme pendant la durée des travaux, qu’on croit devoir
durer huit ans. Mais Panama ne subira-t-elle pas ensuite le sort de
Suez, ville éteinte, presque déserte, que le percement de l’isthme a
galvanisée un moment ?
En ce moment, le défaut de coïncidence encore fréquent entre
les arrivées, d’un côté, et les départs, de l’autre, amène des arrêts
dans le transit des voyageurs, et il y a des compagnies, comme la
Compagnie transatlantique et la Compagnie Atlas, qui ne peuvent
correspondre exactement avec les lignes du Pacifique. Panama en
profite. Quand le canal sera percé, il n’y aura plus ni arrêts ni
transbordements, et ce n’est pas à Panama, dont les productions
sont insignifiantes et le climat désagréable, que ces diverses
compagnies placeront leurs têtes de ligne. Le canal étant à niveau,
c’est-à-dire sans écluses, le personnel en sera relativement peu
nombreux ; les navires entreront par un bout et sortiront par l’autre
sans perdre de temps, et m’est avis que les pauvres Colombiens
verront plus que jamais « passer le train. »
En attendant des jours meilleurs, Panama trompe l’ennui qui
règne en ses murs délabrés par une agitation politique n’ayant rien
de comparable avec tout ce que nous avons vu jusqu’ici. Les blancs
et les noirs, c’est-à-dire les cléricaux et les libéraux, sont en lutte
continuelle, et cette lutte amène fréquemment de sanglants
désordres. L’élément nègre domine à Panama ; uni à quelques
hommes de race blanche, ou plutôt de métis d’Indiens et
d’Espagnols, c’est lui qui représente le parti dit libéral, toujours prêt à
tirer des coups de fusil contre le gouvernement au profit de quelque
homme d’État, lequel, devenu gouvernement à son tour, sera
brutalement renversé par ses amis d’hier quand il n’aura plus de
places à leur donner.
Cette population remuante, turbulente et, ce qui est plus grave,
fainéante, n’est pas encore capable — à supposer qu’elle le
devienne jamais — de s’unir à l’élément européen dans un commun
effort pour la prospérité du pays. Ce n’est pas là une des moindres
raisons qui m’ont donné à penser qu’avec ou sans le canal l’avenir
florissant de Panama est chose très problématique.
Au moment de notre passage, le président de l’État de Panama
était le général Correoso, ayant, comme le général Trujillo, président
de la confédération, et comme tous les généraux colombiens, gagné
ses grades dans les guerres civiles. Nous l’avons entrevu dans une
soirée que les officiers de la corvette anglaise Penguin donnaient
chez leur consul le jour même de notre arrivée. C’est un homme
d’une figure aimable, de manières simples et réservées ; s’il était
sage de juger les gens sur la mine, je conseillerais aux bouillants
Panaméniens de se persuader que la fable des Grenouilles qui
demandent un roi contient le plus politique de tous les préceptes et
de se contenter de ce président-là, qui a l’air et la réputation de
valoir au moins la moyenne de ceux qu’on voudra mettre à sa place.
Mais, bien certainement, ils ne m’écouteraient pas, par la bonne
raison que, quand ils jettent le gouvernement par terre, c’est à la
présidence qu’ils en veulent et non au président. Il n’y a rien à faire à
cela [12] .
[12] Le 28 décembre, une émeute a éclaté à Panama ;
le gouverneur civil de la ville, don Segundo Pena, a été
tué d’un coup de fusil, et peu s’en est fallu que le général
Correoso, sur lequel on a tiré à bout portant, ne fût tué
également. Le lendemain, l’ordre était rétabli ; mais le
président a donné sa démission le 30, et a été remplacé
par don Ricardo Casoria, — jusqu’à nouvelle bagarre.
Les étrangers, au nombre d’un millier, sur une population de dix

mille habitants, assistent philosophiquement aux émeutes,
auxquelles ils ne prennent généralement aucune part, ferment leur
magasin jusqu’à ce que l’orage soit passé et se consolent de l’argent
qu’il leur fait perdre en songeant que, sans la politique et les cock-
tails du Grand-Hôtel, il n’y aurait guère de distractions à Panama.
Le 17 novembre, nous avons pris le chemin de fer pour Colon

(que les Américains appellent Aspinwal), emportant les souhaits de
notre excellent commandant, de tous les officiers du bord et des
quelques compatriotes obligeants qui nous avaient accueillis et
renseignés pendant notre courte station à Panama.
La voie ferrée a été percée dans la forêt vierge qui s’étend sans
interruption sur toute la largeur de l’isthme. La végétation est donc
d’une puissance et d’une richesse extrêmes, et comme cette région
est accidentée d’un grand nombre de mamelons, derniers vestiges
de la Cordillère, il y a de temps à autre de jolis points de vue. La
majeure partie du trajet se fait cependant entre deux haies de
feuillage, dans lesquelles le regard ne pénètre pas à plus de
quelques mètres. Point de clairières, peu d’échappées, donc peu de
paysages, si ce n’est lorsque le train côtoie les bords du rio Chagres,
petit fleuve qui vient se jeter dans la baie de Colon.
Nous avons retrouvé là, mais plus sauvage et plus touffue, la
flore que nous avions admirée au Brésil, avec la même variété infinie
de plantes grimpantes et parasites s’enroulant autour des arbres, se
nouant entre elles mille et mille fois sous des dômes de verdure
impénétrables, tellement compacts et serrés que la lumière du jour a
peine à y parvenir. Au bord même de la voie, on nous a fait
remarquer une grande fleur assez étrange nommée Spiritu Santo,
parce qu’elle a la forme d’une colombe aux ailes déployées.
Le train s’arrête devant quelques villages d’aspect misérable,
formés de simples huttes ou gourbis, habités par des noirs
qu’occupe en ce moment la récolte des bananes.
La pente générale de la voie est très douce et inappréciable à
l’œil ; l’altitude la plus élevée ne dépasse pas, en effet, 85 mètres.
On n’y rencontre que fort peu de travaux d’art, point de tunnels ni de
viaducs et les courbes, assez nombreuses, sont au rayon ordinaire
de 300 à 400 mètres. Les difficultés de l’exécution de ce chemin de
fer n’ont donc pas été causées par la forme du terrain, mais bien
plutôt par sa nature inconsistante et humide, la masse énorme de
végétaux qu’il a fallu faire disparaître, les intempéries des saisons et
l’insalubrité du climat.
Cette question de l’insalubrité de l’isthme américain a pris une
grande importance depuis que les projets de percement sont
considérés comme bientôt réalisables. Or, l’opinion publique a
étendu à tout le territoire compris entre le Guatemala et le golfe de
Darien une si terrible réputation, que, pendant bien longtemps, ce
seul motif faisait juger impraticable le percement du canal
interocéanique. On a raconté, et on raconte encore, que chaque
traverse du chemin de fer de Panama à Colon a coûté la vie à un
homme, ce qui ferait environ quatre-vingt mille existences sacrifiées.
S’il en était ainsi, c’est par centaines de mille qu’il faudrait
compter les travailleurs destinés à succomber dans le percement de
l’isthme. Je me hâte de dire qu’il y a là une exagération dont on
appréciera l’énormité quand on saura qu’au lieu de quatre-vingt mille
coolies chinois morts pendant les travaux du chemin de fer, c’est
quatre à cinq cents qu’il faut lire.
D’une manière générale, les climats tropicaux sont dangereux
pour l’Européen, surtout à cause des excès auxquels il se livre
malgré toutes les recommandations, du peu de précautions
hygiéniques qu’il a coutume de prendre et qui, sous les basses
latitudes, deviennent nécessaires. Le travailleur chinois souffre
moins du changement de climat ; mais, le plus souvent mal traité et
mal nourri, il y supporte avec peine les fatigues d’un labeur exagéré.
Ces observations s’appliquent à Panama comme aux Antilles, au
Brésil, à Sumatra, enfin à tous les pays situés dans la zone torride.
En ce qui concerne l’isthme américain, il faut distinguer les
parties insalubres, marécageuses, telles que le versant de
l’Atlantique dans les États de Nicaragua et de Costa-Rica, d’avec les
parties dont le terrain accidenté donne aux eaux un écoulement
rapide, au sol une base stable et fertile. L’État de Panama, sauf un
ruban assez étroit qui s’étend le long des côtes de l’Atlantique, se
trouve dans ces conditions, qui, au point de vue de la salubrité, sont
les conditions normales des pays intertropicaux.
Il suffit de parcourir les tables de mortalité de la ville de Panama,
les statistiques des cinq années de travaux du chemin de fer et les
rapports des officiers qui ont commandé des stations navales dans
ces parages, pour s’en assurer. C’est, d’ailleurs, ce que j’ai fait.
J’ignore si les grands travaux de terrassement que nécessitera le
percement du canal changeront sensiblement l’état sanitaire du
pays ; mais, quant à présent, on fera bien de laisser de côté, à
propos de Panama et de son isthme, les expressions de « climat
terrible et meurtrier ; » elles entretiennent un préjugé nuisible à la
grande œuvre qui se prépare aujourd’hui et ne sont à leur place que
dans la bouche de ceux qui désireraient qu’on accordât plus de
valeur à leurs travaux ou plus d’intérêt à leurs personnes.
Après cinq heures de route, au moment du coucher du soleil,
nous arrivons à Colon, petite ville bâtie en terrain plat ; c’est un lieu
triste, moins sain que Panama et plus ennuyeux encore, s’il est
possible.
Nous jetons un regard distrait sur les quelques maisons basses,
entrepôts et bureaux alignés le long d’une plage dénudée, et nous
courons nous réfugier à bord de l’Acapulco. A la nuit close, le
steamer largue ses amarres ; nous disons adieu, sans doute pour
toujours, à l’Amérique du Sud, et, par une nuit splendide, nous
glissons rapidement sur la mer des Antilles.
NEW-YORK
Coup de vent dans l’Atlantique. — A New-York. — Le chemin de fer aérien.

— Un poste de pompiers. — Avertisseurs d’incendie. — Chronique
mondaine. — Les bals par abonnement. — Les clubs. — Plus de Junon. —
Retour en France.
A bord de l’Acapulco, 24 novembre.
Nous serons demain à New-York, non sans avoir essuyé un rude

coup de vent, je vous assure. Heureusement, n’a-t-il pas été de trop
longue durée, et l’Acapulco, qui est un solide bateau de cent mètres
de long, taillé pour la course, s’y est bravement comporté.
Partis de Colon le 17 au soir, nous avons joui d’un fort beau
temps pendant quatre jours. Le 19, après avoir coupé les eaux du
fameux courant le Gulf-Stream dans sa branche sud, nous avons
passé entre la Jamaïque et Haïti, l’Hispaniola de Colomb, notre
ancienne Saint-Domingue. Le 20, nous étions en vue de l’île de
Cuba, dont nous avons parfaitement distingué les côtes. En arrière
du phare de Maysi, élevé sur la pointe la plus orientale de l’île, les
falaises s’étagent comme des gradins, formant de gigantesques
marches qui semblent indiquer les périodes successives du
soulèvement de cette terre au-dessus des eaux.
L’Acapulco, passant au milieu des îles Lucayes, a coupé le
tropique du Cancer le 21 et, laissant à bâbord l’île de San-Salvador,
première découverte de Christophe Colomb, put mettre enfin le cap
en ligne droite sur New-York.
C’est dans la nuit du 22 que nous avons été assaillis par le
mauvais temps. En quelques heures, la mer, jusqu’alors calme,
devient très grosse et bientôt la tempête éclate avec une extrême
violence. Le temps reste absolument clair, et les étoiles brillent dans
un ciel pur. Le vent siffle avec rage dans la mâture ; mais, comme les
voiles ont été bien serrées et toutes les précautions voulues prises à
l’avance, il n’y a pas d’avarie à craindre de ce côté. Malgré les
planches à roulis qui nous retiennent dans nos cadres, les
secousses sont tellement violentes qu’il nous est impossible de
fermer l’œil.
Le matin, nous montons sur le pont. L’ouragan est dans toute sa
force, et notre grand navire, battu par des lames énormes, roule
comme un tonneau.
J’ai raconté que, par le travers des côtes de l’Uruguay, nous
avions déjà reçu un coup de vent ; mais c’est seulement aujourd’hui
que nous voyons la mer tout à fait furieuse. Je comprends
maintenant qu’on lui applique ces mots de colère, de rage, qu’on
dise : « les éléments déchaînés », car il semble qu’alors la mer ait
une volonté de destruction et s’acharne contre le navire. Les vagues
paraissent se grossir au loin, se préparer à l’attaque, augmenter de
vitesse à mesure qu’elles approchent et se précipiter à un assaut ;
comme dans une invasion de barbares, les nouveaux combattants
succèdent sans interruption aux premiers, et l’Océan semble une
immense plaine couverte d’innombrables légions ennemies, se ruant
à la bataille avec une ardeur toujours croissante.
Mais le navire, tant qu’il possède ses moyens d’action, reste
indifférent à cette lutte où le triomphe lui est assuré. C’est une
gymnastique à laquelle il est rompu : une lame se présente, haute,
rapide, couronnée d’écume ; sa crête dépasse le niveau du pont, il
semble qu’elle va déferler sur lui, balayant tout sur sa route. Au
moment où elle arrive, le vaillant steamer se soulève doucement ; la
vague s’engage sous lui ; il remonte sans arrêt la pente liquide, puis
son avant retombe un peu ; il flotte comme indécis sur le sommet de
cette masse énorme déjà vaincue ; enfin elle s’échappe, l’arrière
s’élève à son tour, et le même mouvement se renouvellera sans
effort, sans fatigue apparente, jusqu’à ce que la mer, enfin lassée, se
calmant d’elle-même, lui permette de reprendre sa marche à toute
vitesse pour regagner les heures perdues.
Les vagues que nous avons observées pendant ce coup de vent
avaient, au dire des marins, cinq à six mètres de hauteur. On en voit
souvent de beaucoup plus fortes aux environs du cap Horn et sur
toute l’étendue des mers antarctiques ; mais il n’est pas probable
qu’elles dépassent jamais une dizaine de mètres, en sorte que les
lames monstrueuses, « hautes comme des montagnes », sont à
reléguer dans le domaine de la fantaisie avec le vaisseau Fantôme,
le grand Serpent de mer et autres poétiques inventions.
Nous avons aperçu quelques navires, des voiliers, tous à la
cape, c’est-à-dire avec une voilure très réduite, composée
seulement du petit foc et du grand hunier au bas ris. Ils se laissaient
aller au gré de la tempête, livrés à une sarabande échevelée, tantôt
sur la crête des vagues, tantôt disparaissant dans leur creux. L’un
d’eux avait perdu son mât de misaine et son grand mât de
perroquet ; mais comme il n’a fait aucun signal de détresse, nous
avons continué notre route.
Bref, l’Acapulco en a été quitte pour trois voiles défoncées par le
vent, au moment où on a essayé de les établir, et le temps, maniable
aujourd’hui, n’a d’autre inconvénient que d’être extrêmement froid.
En débarquant à New-York, la neige et la glace nous attendent.
Je ne puis m’empêcher de remarquer que notre voyage n’est pas
seulement d’agrément et d’études, c’est aussi un voyage
d’acclimatation.
Qu’on ne s’avise pas de nous demander, à notre retour, combien
nous avons de printemps, cela nous vieillirait trop. En quatre mois,
nous avons passé par deux hivers et deux étés. Cette fois-ci, la
température vient de s’abaisser de 35° en cinq jours ; c’est un
changement un peu brusque. Aussi sommes-nous devenus frileux
comme des Arabes, tout en étant équipés comme des Esquimaux.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
New-York, 28 novembre.
Depuis trois jours, nous sommes au Grand Central Hotel, dans le

magnifique Broadway, qui, à mon humble avis, n’est qu’un banal
boulevard, moins large que les nôtres, animé, bien garni de
boutiques, mais absolument dépourvu de cette tranquille élégance
qui caractérise la rue de la Paix ou le boulevard des Italiens.
La première impression, en arrivant à New-York, n’a pas été des
plus favorables ; le passage de l’Hudson, depuis Sandy Hook
jusqu’au wharf, est intéressant, et tout indique l’approche d’une cité
de premier ordre ; mais, en mettant le pied dans les mares de neige
fondue qui s’étalent sur les voies publiques, jusqu’à ce qu’il plaise au
soleil de les dessécher, ou au froid de les transformer en casse-cou,
nous n’avons pu réprimer de sévères critiques.
Suivant mon habitude, j’ai commencé par inspecter la ville au
hasard, courant de la Battery au Central Park, de la rivière de l’Est
aux quais de l’Hudson, montant dans le premier car venu, pour me
laisser mener n’importe où, et, grâce au fameux Elevated Railroad
(chemin de fer suspendu), parfaitement sûr de retrouver mon hôtel,
avec un quart d’heure au plus de retard ou d’avance.
Cet Elevated Railroad est bien le moyen de locomotion le plus
commode qu’on puisse imaginer. Il s’adapte merveilleusement aux
besoins de la population de New-York. La ville est construite en
forme de coin, dont la pointe est dirigée vers le sud ; la rivière de
l’Est et l’Hudson se réunissent à cette pointe et s’en vont de là, ne
formant plus qu’un seul fleuve, jusqu’à la mer. Ainsi limitée de trois
côtés, New-York s’étend constamment vers le nord et s’étendra ainsi
jusqu’à ce qu’elle ait envahi toute l’île de Manhattan, sur laquelle elle
est bâtie, et cela arrivera bientôt.
La vieille ville, qui est naturellement le centre du commerce et
des affaires, est donc la partie inférieure, et comme il n’y a plus de
place pour la vie privée dans cette accumulation de bureaux, de
banques, de docks et de magasins, tout le monde demeure dans la
ville haute. Il en résulte que chaque matin une population de deux ou
trois cent mille personnes descend à son travail et en revient chaque
soir. Ce sont les Elevated qui se chargent de transporter cette marée
humaine.
Du côté de l’Hudson, où se trouve le quartier le mieux habité, et
parallèlement à la rive, il y a deux voies ferrées, indépendantes l’une
de l’autre ; du côté de l’est, il n’y en a qu’une. Les wagons passent à
la hauteur du premier, du second ou du troisième étage des
maisons, suivant les dénivellations du sol. Il y a des stations à peu
près toutes les deux minutes, et les trains se suivent de si près qu’on
n’a jamais à attendre.
Quant au fonctionnement, il est simplement parfait. On prend son
billet, on monte, on descend, on rend son billet, sans qu’une
seconde soit perdue. Les wagons, plus grands que nos tramways,
ont la même disposition, avec plate-forme à l’avant et à l’arrière. Au
moment où le train arrive, il passe avec tant de rapidité qu’on
suppose qu’il va brûler la station. Point. Il s’arrête court, et pourtant
sans aucun choc ; on passe de plain-pied sur la plate-forme ; le train
repart presque immédiatement. L’arrêt n’a pas été de plus de huit à
dix secondes.
Si pressée et grande que soit la foule, il n’y a ni poussée, ni
désordre, ni cris ; cela se fait tranquillement, adroitement. Pourquoi
marcherait-on sur les pieds de ses voisins de peur de manquer de
place, quand, au moment où le train se remet en route, on voit le
train suivant, à quelques centaines de mètres, qui s’avance à toute
vapeur ?
Arrivé à destination, on descend, on laisse tomber dans une
boîte en verre, sous les yeux d’un employé, le billet qui vous a été
remis, et c’est tout. Point de contrôle, point de queue, pas d’autre
limite au nombre des voyageurs que la place occupée par chacun ;
les premiers arrivés sont assis, les autres debout. Il est possible
qu’un de ces jours l’Elevated tombe dans une rue, tuant deux ou
trois cents voyageurs et écrasant une trentaine de passants ; mais
en attendant cette catastrophe, qui peut-être n’arrivera jamais, il
rend aux habitants de New-York d’inappréciables services.
Hier, j’ai vu une installation d’un autre genre qui m’a vivement
intéressé et surpris. C’est l’organisation d’un poste de pompiers. La
chose a été souvent décrite. Au reste, tout ce qu’il y a à New-York l’a
été cent fois. Si donc, lecteur, vous connaissez l’organisation des
postes de pompiers à New-York, veuillez tourner la page ; dans le
cas contraire, je vous conseille de lire, car la perfection ici est
poussée à un tel point que cela touche à la coquetterie.
Le poste que nous avons visité est dans une petite rue voisine de
Broadway et de Washington Square. Nous arrivons vers onze
heures du soir, accompagnés d’un jeune Américain, fils du
correspondant de la Société des voyages à New-York, lequel
connaissait l’officier commandant le poste. Nous nous faisons
reconnaître, et nous entrons.
En face de la porte est une grande voiture portant la pompe à
vapeur ; à gauche, une autre voiture un peu moins grande, munie
d’un énorme tambour sur lequel est enroulée une manche en toile ;
au fond, trois boxes, dans lesquelles sont trois beaux chevaux, bien
tranquilles.
Je passe les détails : seaux, lampes, robinets, manivelles,
instruments accessoires accrochés aux côtés et au-dessous des
voitures. L’officier nous fait remarquer que les harnais sont
suspendus au plafond par de petites cordes. Deux des chevaux
doivent traîner la pompe, le troisième la manche à incendie. Tout ce
matériel est si bien fourbi, poli, astiqué, qu’on pourrait l’envoyer tel
quel à une exposition de carrosserie. Un homme de garde, en tenue
correcte, se promène sous la remise. Sauf le brillant et la propreté
excessive des moindres objets, nous ne voyons jusque-là rien
d’extraordinaire.
Le capitaine de pompiers nous conduit auprès d’un petit tableau
encadré, où sont inscrits les noms de tous les blocks ou pâtés de
maisons de la ville de New-York ; à côté du tableau est une sonnerie
électrique avec deux timbres, un grand et un petit. Cela sert à
donner le signal d’alarme et à indiquer, par une combinaison de
coups simples et de coups doubles, un numéro d’ordre
correspondant à l’endroit où un incendie vient de se déclarer.
— Tout cela est très bien ordonné, dis-je à l’officier ; et combien
de temps faut-il pour que vos hommes soient prêts, la pompe attelée
et en route ?
— Environ quinze secondes, monsieur.
J’avais bien entendu : quinze secondes, mais je pensai qu’il avait
voulu dire quinze minutes. Je répétai ma question.
— Oui, monsieur, quinze secondes, sauf accident, mais c’est
rare.
— Vos hommes sont habillés, sans doute ?
— Non, monsieur, ils sont couchés et déshabillés, et ils dorment.
Voulez-vous voir ?
Nous montons au premier, et nous arrivons dans un dortoir fort
propre où huit hommes dorment à poings fermés ; leurs habits sont
disposés uniformément sur le plancher au pied de leur lit. Le
capitaine nous montre comment cet équipement est arrangé : les
bottes sont fixées à la culotte, qui est fixée elle-même à la veste. Il
s’approche de l’un des lits et touche le dormeur à l’épaule :
« Smith ! » le pompier ouvre les yeux, jette draps et couvertures,
tombe les deux pieds dans ses bottes, passe les manches de sa
veste, boutonne d’une main agile les huit boutons réglementaires.
En moins de temps qu’il ne faut, non pour le dire, mais pour
l’imaginer, il était prêt.
— Et les chevaux ?
— Si vous voulez bien vous donner la peine de descendre, je
vais vous montrer comment nous nous y prenons.
Au moment où nous atteignons le bas de l’escalier, un carillon
très fort et très précipité se fait entendre, l’officier nous crie :
« Rangez-vous ! » et nous pousse près du mur. Les trois chevaux
sortent en courant de leurs boxes et vont se placer d’eux-mêmes
sous les harnais ; l’homme de garde décroche les suspentes, tout le
harnachement tombe déployé et se trouve exactement à sa place.
Pendant qu’en deux coups de poignet secs il ferme les colliers à
ressort, le poste entier dégringole comme une avalanche le petit
escalier, les cochers sautent d’un bond sur leurs sièges, les servants
sur l’arrière des voitures ; deux hommes à la porte battante ont tiré
les verrous et sont prêts à ouvrir ; sur un signe de l’officier, les deux
voitures vont partir au galop.
Je n’avais pas eu la présence d’esprit de compter les secondes,
mais assurément il ne s’en était pas écoulé plus de dix ou douze.
Pendant ce temps, le gros timbre, battant un certain nombre de
coups, avait fait connaître le lieu où était l’incendie. Un second appel
du carillon eût été l’ordre de s’élancer dans la rue.
Nous étions absolument émerveillés, et ce qui nous paraissait le
plus inexplicable était la manœuvre des chevaux s’en allant aux
brancards tout seuls. Qui donc les avait détachés ? Le même
courant électrique qui avait mis en mouvement la sonnerie. Ce
courant actionne un mécanisme de déclanchement très simple, et
les animaux se trouvent instantanément débarrassés de leurs licous.
Ils sont dressés à sortir de leurs boxes au premier bruit du carillon,
et c’est avec une ardeur presque joyeuse qu’ils vont se placer sous
les harnais.
C’était dans un quartier fort éloigné que le feu s’était déclaré ;
aussi l’officier était-il à peu près sûr de n’être pas appelé pour
l’éteindre. Mais il est de règle que dès qu’un incendie est signalé, si
peu important qu’il soit, tous les postes de la ville, au nombre d’une
cinquantaine, font la manœuvre à laquelle nous venons d’assister. Si
après cinq minutes un nouveau signal ne s’est pas fait entendre,
l’officier renvoie ses hommes se coucher. Il y a parfois trois ou
quatre alertes dans la même nuit, et le capitaine du poste nous a
assuré en avoir eu plus de cinq cents dans le cours de l’année
dernière.
Le plus grand nombre des postes de pompiers de la ville de
New-York ont été créés par les compagnies d’assurance contre
l’incendie. Elles ont trouvé cette dépense moins onéreuse que le
payement des indemnités. Ceci est intelligent et pratique. Pourquoi
nos compagnies n’en font-elles pas autant ?
Là-bas, il n’a pas suffi d’organiser un admirable service pour
éteindre les plus terribles incendies ; on s’est appliqué aussi à les
prévenir, se basant sur une vérité indiscutable, que celui qui brûle a
un intérêt capital à prévenir les pompiers. C’est sur ce sage principe
qu’est établie l’organisation des « avertisseurs ». Chaque maître de
maison ou chef de famille habitant New-York reçoit, sur sa demande,
une grosse clef en cuivre, portant un numéro. Le feu prend-il chez
lui, et craint-il de ne pouvoir l’éteindre aussitôt, lui-même ou un des
siens court avec la clef en question jusqu’au réverbère qui fait l’angle
de la rue, ouvre une petite porte en fonte et démasque ainsi un
indicateur à aiguille qu’il place au numéro de la maison.
Le seul fait d’ouvrir la porte, prévient par une sonnerie électrique
le poste de pompiers le plus voisin, et l’indicateur lui fait connaître
exactement où est le feu. Ce poste prévenu transmet l’indication au
poste central de la ville, s’équipe et sort. Le poste central
communique le renseignement à tous les autres. En une minute,
l’immense matériel du Fire Office est prêt à être lancé au triple galop
et concentré sur le lieu du sinistre.
On ne manquera pas de supposer que d’aimables plaisants
s’avisent d’ouvrir les portes des réverbères avertisseurs, pour la
seule distraction de faire faire l’exercice aux pompiers. Mais le cas a
été prévu : dès que la porte a été ouverte, la clef ne peut, sans un
instrument spécial, être retirée de la serrure. Or, le numéro que porte
cette clef correspond au nom de son propriétaire, lequel, découvert
immédiatement, payerait d’une forte amende le luxe de cette
mauvaise farce.
Nous devons partir dans deux jours pour Washington, puis,
revenant à New-York, commencer bientôt notre course à travers les
États-Unis. Le jour n’en est pas encore fixé. M. de Saint-Clair, qui
nous a accompagnés ici, attend les dépêches que la Société doit lui
envoyer de Paris. Nous ne pouvons nous rappeler sans inquiétude
les ennuis qui ont déjà menacé d’arrêter notre voyage, et ce retard
dans l’arrivée des ordres relatifs à notre grande excursion nous fait
craindre que de nouvelles difficultés n’aient surgi.

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Weird Fiction: A Genre Study Michael

Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 1st ed. Edition

Edith Wharton and Genre: Beyond Fiction 1st ed. Edition

Introducing Cisco Unified Computing System: Learn Cisco

Transmedia/Genre: Rethinking Genre in a Multiplatform

The Origins of Science Fiction Michael Newton (Editor)

The Detective's Companion in Crime Fiction: A Study in

Humility and Human Flourishing : A Study in Analytic

Transformations of a Genre: A Literary History of the

ISBN 978-3-030-92449-2 ISBN 978-3-030-92450-8 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Heritage Image Partnerships Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

1 Genre and Judgement 1

Genre and Judgement

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

An immanent genre is one whose resemblances are reciprocal. They are

order to sell them to a market defined by that redundant model is to write

So, to return to the idea of a canon: if we designate a canon, or a period,

Returning to “The Law of Genre” for a moment—Derrida and Ronell

Fantasy. Where the supernatural is not a category, but an opening out

A genre is produced by literary works and contributes to the production

memory-images, and repeat as new models. There is no concern for purity

Claire Colebrook writes that a concept is an extreme, not an average.6 If

The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of

Cezanne’s paintings disappear, but that is not simply the absence of an

economic and class system that is inherently exploitative and indifferent to

Another difference between major and minor writing: major literature

Is genre structure? Necessarily? Couldn’t it be a machine, a vehicle, at least

supernatural understood as what is excluded from the category of the

This goes further than presenting everything we are supposed to reject,

emerge as a masterstroke of reason in a form of free play that does not

In a filmed interview, John Brunner defined genre as the repetition of an

in the phrase “memory-image” is concretely associated by Bergson with

Where Fantasy introduces the supernatural as an aspect of another world,

In The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov writes: “The fantastic … lasts only as

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27

experience a logical conundrum, let alone render a considered opinion

Three possibilities: the supernatural is definitely involved in the story

common opinion? On the contrary, common opinion is always wrong,

Can a form of art be “replaced” and “made useless” by something else,

The Haunting of Hill House, there is no “replacement” of the genuine

In weird fiction, two concepts interact to produce a “local” supernatural-

Readers of weird fiction are constantly encountering passages like this

[T]he supernatural story, as I say, is something of a test. Tell a group of new

Remembering Claire Colebrook’s definition of concepts as extremes,4 we

selection of the supernatural interpretation. Admitting the possibility of

Wonder is an imagination of a thing in which the Mind remains fixed because

A supposedly impossible event arises out of the uncertainty of becoming

What relationship is there between the supernatural of weird fiction and

event will then appear in connection with dogma. The disconnected

horizontal, which is to say that the supernatural becomes the “beyond”

to be an inaugurator of a new kind of critical philosophy, sets himself into

Gothic fiction does not arise as a response to the radical uncertainty of

Kant undertook to address Hume’s scepticism, although, as Salomon

L’espoir, — je ne serai pas assez cruel pour dire : le rêve, — des

Sans chercher à démontrer, ce qui serait facile, que pendant

Les étrangers, au nombre d’un millier, sur une population de dix

Le 17 novembre, nous avons pris le chemin de fer pour Colon

Coup de vent dans l’Atlantique. — A New-York. — Le chemin de fer aérien.

A bord de l’Acapulco, 24 novembre.

Nous serons demain à New-York, non sans avoir essuyé un rude

Depuis trois jours, nous sommes au Grand Central Hotel, dans le

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1 Genre and Judgement 1