Well, this was one of the subjects of the Lovecraft / Weird Fiction
conference I was at on Thursday over at Goldsmiths. Amongst other
things, we were trying to see if we could work out what distinguishes
the weird from the uncanny / fantastic / marvellous.
One formulation went like this. The (Freudian) uncanny is what seems
supernatural, but really isn't - a trick of the light, a quiver on
the surface of the natural. The marvellous is released from all
constraints of naturalism. The fantastic the momentary equivocation
between uncanny and the marvellous. The weird, on the other hand, is
the addition to the natural of a novel truth - an enormity - which is
then retroactively normalised. It *always was true* that Cthulhu
sleeps in R'lyeh, but this truth is activated by being discovered
(through a purely mundane process of investigation and "correlation"
of natural fact).
This is a bit like an *a priori* - discovered in the midst of
experience, but discovered as a necessary ground for experience itself
- except that instead of grounding experience, the weird enormity
invalidates it: your entire sense of yourself and your place in the
cosmos up until now turns out to have been a pathetic delusion.
Compare the sequence in the classic alien abduction narrative where a
hitherto unsuspecting (yet strangely troubled) person goes to a
therapist and, under hypnosis, recovers repressed memories of being
abducted by aliens. When confronted with the question of whether these
memories are real or false (e.g. in some way "implanted" by the
therapist who uncovered them, or confabulated during therapy), the
subject acknowledges that the specific memories s/he has *might very
well* be false, but nevertheless act as a screen / portal for the
real, unrecoverable and unassimilable memory of having been abducted.
Even though the "recovered memory" is a fake, its retroactive effect
of truth is still in operation: from now on, that person's story is
the story of an alien abductee, and the "fake memory" episode is just
another episode in that story, itself a consequence to the original
transcendental shock of abduction ("I invented these fake memories in
order to protect myself from the mind-shattering terror of my real
memories...").
I think that Lovecraft's fiction has this kind of structure: it
produces a retroactive effect of truth, which outlasts the rather
fanciful terms in which the originary horror is often projected
("Trauma will always linger", as Xasthur's Malefic has it).
Dominic
