Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle 3030326519, 9783030326517, 9783030326524

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 7
Contents......Page 9
1 Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siècle......Page 11
Knowing the Weird......Page 16
Scientific Borderlands......Page 26
Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle......Page 36
Part I Borderlands of Mind, Body, and Spirit......Page 53
2 Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology, and States of Mind in Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen......Page 54
“Ripples Over the Threshold”: The Weird Case of Jekyll and Hyde......Page 55
Enchanted Student: Arthur Machen’s Borderlands......Page 63
Symbols of Something and Nothing: The Great God Pan......Page 70
Conclusion......Page 79
3 Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit......Page 87
Body and Spirit as Ways of Knowing......Page 88
Dr. Jekyll’s Self-Experiment......Page 95
“Brain of a Devil”: Arthur Machen’s “The Inmost Light”......Page 100
“The Three Drugs”......Page 106
“The Five Senses”......Page 110
Conclusion......Page 116
4 Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson......Page 122
The Weirdfinding Profession......Page 123
Flaxman Low’s Real Ghosts......Page 132
John Silence’s Powerful Sympathy......Page 139
Thomas Carnacki’s Occult Inventions......Page 148
Conclusion......Page 156
Part II Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter......Page 164
5 Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells......Page 165
Biological Borderlands and Where to Find Them......Page 166
Pumas and Rabbits: The Horrors and Hopes of The Island of Doctor Moreau......Page 171
The “Boundary Kingdom”: William Hope Hodgson’s Cryptogamy......Page 181
Doubtful Beings: “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict”......Page 185
Conclusion......Page 193
6 Weird Energies: Physics, Futures, and the Secrets of the Universe in Hodgson and Blackwood......Page 201
New Worlds a-quiver: Energetic Realms......Page 202
Energetic Abfutures: The House on the Borderland and The Night Land......Page 208
The House on the Borderland......Page 209
The Night Land......Page 215
“Heat from a Magical Source”: Blackwood, Energy, and Quantum Weird......Page 220
“The Willows”......Page 221
Blackwood’s Quantum Weird......Page 229
Conclusion......Page 233
Afterword......Page 242
Index......Page 245

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle

Emily Alder

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Catherine Belling Feinberg School of Medicine Northwestern University Chicago, IL, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial Board Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University of Oxford, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613

Emily Alder

Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle

Emily Alder Edinburgh Napier University Edinburgh, UK

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-030-32651-7 ISBN 978-3-030-32652-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved 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, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover image: © Library Book Collection/Alamy Stock Photo, Arthur and Fritz Kahn Collection 1889–1932 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Beth and George

Acknowledgements

This book began not in my doctoral research but in my viva, in the moment when one of my examiners asked why I had (at the last possible moment) removed the word “gothic” from the original title of my thesis, and the other suggested that “weird” might be the elusive replacement I sought. My first thanks, therefore, are to Roger Luckhurst for that spark. At around the same time, Laurence Davies introduced me to the British Society for Literature and Science, in which I found an intellectual home as well as discovering I had been more or less conducting a literature and science Ph.D. without knowing it—I am grateful to all of you, as well as to my supervisors Linda Dryden and Sara Wasson for setting me on the path. Ten years later, this book is not that thesis. I revisited the work of William Hope Hodgson explicitly through a new lens—weird fiction and science—and found many new companions for him along the way, too, as the following chapters unfold. Over the 4 or 5 years in which I have worked on this monograph, I have benefited from the help, expertise, and inspiration of a great many people, especially those in the BSLS, in the International Gothic Association, and at Edinburgh Napier University—thank you. The refuge, crucible, café, and comedy zone of G6 and its residents have done, and do, more to keep me going than they probably realise—much love. I owe further thanks to Anne Schwan, Andrew Frayn, Duncan Milne, and Xavier Aldana Reyes for reading portions of the manuscript and for their constructive and encouraging feedback. Any mistakes are, vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

of course, mine. My thanks, too, for the generous knowledge and enthusiasm of the scholarly and fan communities of Blackwood, Machen, and Hodgson, especially to Sam Gafford and Grove Koger. And, lastly, to Rod, for your irreplaceable personal, practical, and intellectual support. Edinburgh March 2019

Emily Alder

Contents

1 Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siècle 1 Knowing the Weird 6 Scientific Borderlands 16 Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle 26 Part I  Borderlands of Mind, Body, and Spirit 2 Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology, and States of Mind in Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen 45 “Ripples Over the Threshold”: The Weird Case of Jekyll and Hyde 46 Enchanted Student: Arthur Machen’s Borderlands 54 Symbols of Something and Nothing: The Great God Pan 62 Conclusion 70 3 Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit 79 Body and Spirit as Ways of Knowing 80 Dr. Jekyll’s Self-Experiment 88 “Brain of a Devil”: Arthur Machen’s “The Inmost Light” 92 Expanded Worlds: Edith Nesbit’s “The Three Drugs” and “The Five Senses” 98 ix

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CONTENTS

“The Three Drugs” 98 “The Five Senses” 103 Conclusion 108 4 Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson 115 The Weirdfinding Profession 116 Flaxman Low’s Real Ghosts 125 John Silence’s Powerful Sympathy 132 Thomas Carnacki’s Occult Inventions 142 Conclusion 149 Part II  Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter 5 Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells 159 Biological Borderlands and Where to Find Them 160 Pumas and Rabbits: The Horrors and Hopes of The Island of Doctor Moreau 165 The “Boundary Kingdom”: William Hope Hodgson’s Cryptogamy 175 Doubtful Beings: “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict” 179 Conclusion 187 6 Weird Energies: Physics, Futures, and the Secrets of the Universe in Hodgson and Blackwood 195 New Worlds a-quiver: Energetic Realms 196 Energetic Abfutures: The House on the Borderland and The Night Land 202 “Heat from a Magical Source”: Blackwood, Energy, and Quantum Weird 214 Conclusion 227 Afterword 237 Index 241

CHAPTER 1

Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siècle

Near the end of Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery (1988), Rincewind the wizard finds himself in the Dungeon Dimensions, a dark realm of “skewed images” and “weird curvature.” He observes a number of Things clustered around a hole in the fabric of reality, including one resembling “a dead horse that had been dug up after three months and then introduced to a range of new experiences, at least one of which had included an octopus.”1 Attracted to the warmth and light of the human world, these Things are not ghosts or revenants; they are unrelated to any traditional mythology, individual past, or family history. They are indifferent to human concerns (or those of any other Discworld species). Motivating concepts of good and evil, desire and revenge, or hate and compassion don’t apply to them. Their existence, like that of the Discworld itself, might be playfully explained by quantum physics and the possibility of multiple simultaneous realities, but they are also irrational creations whose shapes buckle the scientific logic of evolutionary adaptation, even if understood on a cosmic scale. The Things of the Dungeon Dimensions parody the mythos of the Lovecraftian weird tale. But H. P. Lovecraft was not the first to manipulate the limits of reality and being in this way. In 100 Best Horror Stories, Pratchett recounts his 1950s childhood encounters with the writing of William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), whose The House on the Borderland (1908) gripped him with the notion that

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Alder, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_1

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outside the shadow-thin walls of the world itself there were dreadful things, looking in and biding their time. […] it made me believe that Space was big and Time was endless and that what I thought of as normality was a 30 W lightbulb with only fivepence left in the meter and there was nothing anyone could do about it. […] It was the Big Bang in my private universe as sf/fantasy reader and, later, writer.2

As Pratchett’s reflections suggest, Hodgson’s tales mark an important stage in weird fiction. They develop the groundwork of earlier horror and supernatural fantasies in which he was well read, and to which notions of unstable boundaries to the known world and what lay beyond were nothing new. In Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Clarke glimpses “a presence, that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead, but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form,” and before that, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Henry Jekyll peels away the “fleshly vestment” of material existence to access the states beyond “this seemingly so solid body.”3 Earlier still, “all the attributes with which superstition clothes the being of the shadowy borderland that lies beyond the chart of our visual world” surround the enigmatic Margrave of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story (1861), while the “unearthly,” “hideous” voice of Edgar Allan Poe’s M. Valdemar, mesmerically suspended on the brink of death, profoundly affects his listeners with the “unutterable, shuddering horror” of whatever lies beyond.4 These are all tales of borderland science, using and stretching the ideas and discourses of their time to produce narratives of strange horror, although we might not necessarily call all of them “weird” any more than their authors would have. As the examples above suggest, the early roots of the weird tale are entangled with those of gothic and science fiction. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a good place to turn and move forward again. Frankenstein is an important example of how popular fictional forms such as the gothic romance could work with the wealth of ideas and techniques offered by science. Victor Frankenstein’s development of “instruments of life” to infuse a “spark of being” into his lifeless creation positions his efforts within contemporary interest in galvanism, electrochemistry and the possibility that a form of electricity might explain the source of conscious life.5 It also places him near the start of a respectable line of borderland scientists in fiction. However, we might label the diverse non-realist

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literary styles that followed Frankenstein; science is woven into their cultural history, as it is into that of more mainstream Victorian literature. The close relationship of discourses of literature and science, their mutual influences on each other, and their functions in nineteenth-century culture more widely, have been demonstrated in a number of contexts.6 This book traces one route through this terrain, examining how, by the fin de siècle, contemporary sciences and their borderlands had helped to stimulate a particular variety of speculative fiction, the weird tale. That said, weird fiction is far from homogenous; a single description is sufficiently elusive for Michael Moorcock to suggest that “[w]hat is left after other definitions are exhausted is the weird story.”7 In fact, many of the texts I will be discussing might also be identified as fantasy, as gothic, as horror, as ghost stories, and as science fiction. The ways in which genre writing became organised by writers, publishers, and critics during the twentieth century have made such labels and their conventions familiar, but at the fin de siècle they were either non-existent or had little categorising force. The fin-de-siècle weird tale sometimes gets lost in the gaps between critical and generic categories, but it rewards examination in its own right and can offer ways to look anew at texts more commonly associated with other modes. Here, I put works like H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Machen’s The Great God Pan, and Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) alongside rich but less well-known stories by Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, and Edith Nesbit for examination as weird tales through their shared interest, one way or another, in fin-de-siècle scientific borderlands. Broadly speaking, works by these six writers have either been identified as weird but granted little sustained critical attention, or have attracted considerable critical attention but rarely in the context of the weird.8 That situation is now changing healthily, with a number of critical studies recently published, alongside an influx of “New Weird” fictions since the 2000s.9 With this book, I contribute an exploration of the weird tale’s development at the fin de siècle through its relationships with contemporary science. The fin-de-siècle weird has much to offer our current uncertain political, economic, and environmental moment. Weird tales, though at times reactionary, can offer radical new forms of knowledge—ecological, philosophical, and spiritual, for example—and model new sets of relations between selves and others. Timothy Morton argues that “[e]cological awareness is weird,” “twisted,” and “looping,” a distinct response to our current world.10 Eugene Thacker has proposed that horror (here more or

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less encompassing weird) can function philosophically as a way to meet the challenge of “comprehending the world in which we live as both a human and a non-human world – and of comprehending this politically.”11 Other scholars, too, recognise the weird’s capacities to offer alternative, non-hegemonic ways of knowing the world.12 In what follows, I extend this argument into fin-de-siècle scientific borderlands and weird fiction’s often subversive or playful approaches to scientific conventions of the time. The tales I explore expose the limits of certainty in knowledge and of human capacities for mastery, but, importantly, they don’t respond with denial or erasure. Once a weird understanding of the world is out there, there it stays. The stories recognise that human agency and certainty about the present or the future are limited and provisional— which might be a frightening state to confront but is a more desirable, ethical position to take in a frightening world, now as then. Over the coming chapters, I advance the following arguments. Firstly, weird fiction has its own place in how we understand the relations between literature and science in this period. Fin-de-siècle weird fiction, I argue, was often doing remarkably bold work by plunging into some of the same ontological and epistemological quagmires as mainstream scientific philosophy. This is what leads S. T. Joshi to describe the weird as less a genre than “a consequence of a world view.”13 Weird fiction is a consequence of the kind of worldview that was itself both a consequence and a driver of scientific change in the late nineteenth century. That worldview, as I will elaborate, is related to those of gothic and science fiction but different to them. The weird is a mode capable of doing different things with scientific culture than gothic and sf; a weird science lens promises productive readings of texts more normally recruited to those allied modes. Secondly, fictions of borderland science in the British fin-de-siècle period (by which I mean, fairly generously, about 1880 to about 1914) form a significant component of the history of the weird tale. Recurring ideas (such as unknowable dimensions, radical teratology, unspeakability) now strongly associated with the weird tale, developed markedly in the crucible of fin-de-siècle science and culture (if not necessarily originating in it). Science is not just an interesting lens through which to interrogate weird fiction, but is integral to the emergence of the weird tale as a new mode in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, weird tales speak back to science through their explorations of often similar philosophical or theoretical questions.

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At the heart of this book lies the premise that a close relationship with science is essential to the weird’s existence and takes a unique form. In many cases, I argue, fin-de-siècle science is not made weird by fiction, but was already weird to start with. By “science,” I mean not a monolithic discourse or single set of methods, but a tremendous diversity of stances, knowledges, and practices, of which I can only (and shortly will) explore a few. By “weird” I mean—what? I have already sketched a few traits of the weird, but equally important to it and to the argument of this book is what cannot be outlined or specified. William Hope Hodgson’s occult sleuth Thomas Carnacki, explaining weird phenomena to his in-story listeners, wonders whether he is “making it all clear to you”—to which writer China Miéville responds: “No. Not clear at all. These monsters are the opposite of clear.”14 The desire of much nineteenth-century science to observe, know, and reveal nature’s secrets conflicts (productively and creatively, for the stories I’ll discuss) with the weird’s irreducibility and its borderland natural-yet-unnatural phenomena (what I will at times call the more-than-visible world).15 Roger Luckhurst has suggested that the weird “has no quintessence” but is “always receding out of sight […] a mongrel that slithers out of reach.”16 For Luckhurst, the weird is wayward; accordingly, “disorientation” offers a better guide than an attempt to map out a straight route. To become disorientated to the weird is to recognise and allow its elusiveness and inversions, to notice it on the peripheries of what can be understood and articulated.17 One in particular of Hodgson’s books offers an extended murky disorientation of this sort: The Night Land (1912). In a world deprived of sunlight, the protagonist, X, must navigate across black expanses and negotiate invisible perils that don’t make sense. Hidden “Doorways In The Night” exude “queer and improper” sounds that are simultaneously close above his head and at tremendous distance “out of a Foreign Place.”18 X knows the sound, yet also knows he has never heard it before. “[Y]ou shall know how it did seem,” he tells us if you will conceive of a strange noise that does happen far away in the Country, and the same noise to seem to come to you through an opened door. And this is but a poor way to put it; yet how shall I make the thing more known to you?19

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Like Carnacki, X asks his readers this kind of question frequently. How shall we make the weird known to us? One answer is to read the notoriously unreadable The Night Land (which I recommend nonetheless); another is that the weird is best left unknown, although a number of fin-de-siècle weird tale characters fail to realise that. This is especially true of scientist characters; in weird fiction, the capacity of conventional science to know the world has limits, because the waywardness of weird realities evades grasp. In that, there may be a warning to the curious critic.20 If so, what is an author of a book like this to do, as a creator of knowledge, with a mode of fiction that does not want to be known? Fortunately, this book is not the account of weird fiction and science at the fin de siècle; it is one account—my account—written because all three elements intersect in ways profoundly fascinating to me. It is necessarily selective; I don’t discuss maths, or astronomy, for example; my weird authors are all British, and they don’t include (though not for the lack of admiration) M. R. James or M. P. Shiel. The task is, as X puts it, not to make the thing known to you, but to make it more known. Here is some of what I know.

Knowing the Weird Through Weird Tales , which published “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) and many others, the name of H. P. Lovecraft “became virtually synonymous with the weird tale.”21 Hence the adjective I have already used: “Lovecraftian.” Yet such was the weird tale’s low reputation for many years that the close association may not always have aided either writer or mode. The place of weird fiction in the history of fantastic writing broadly conceived has not always been noticed. In 1977, when Julia Briggs published her landmark book on the ghost story, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story, we can in retrospect see the category of the weird lurking in the shadows. Briggs describes how the “traditional” outlook of the ghost story gave way to a “natural successor, science fiction, […] better suited to an age at once more materialistic and more obviously endangered by its own technology.”22 Weird tales, concerned with rather materialist “ghosts” and responding directly to the changes of a modern age, underlie this shift, and never went away. The story of the weird’s journey from “a fugitive category, a blur in the corner of other genres […] usually abjected as the lowest form of

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culture” to a radical contemporary fantastic mode spawning theoretical elaborations and revisionary literary histories (like this one) has been ably told elsewhere.23 I draw out the most relevant strands here, not least because the general picture in literary criticism of fin-de-siècle non-realist fiction remains mainly that of a privileging of other terminology over the blur in the corner. Aaron Worth, for example, in a recent article, though alluding to Machen’s “weird art,” chooses to call his 1890s tales “horror fiction.”24 Michael Cook’s Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, which examines E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low stories, essentially follows Briggs’s terminology of “ghost story” and “supernatural,” while Mark De Cicco proposes a “queer supernatural” to describe Jekyll and Hyde, The Great God Pan, and Blackwood’s John Silence stories.25 It is not, it seems, a lack of interest in the texts or their culture that marginalises the weird as a category but something about the word itself. Perhaps it didn’t help that Lovecraft (for good reasons) titled an influential survey essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” rather than, say, “Weird Literature.” It probably also didn’t help that Darko Suvin’s strategy in the 1970s for elevating science fiction as a serious mode involved distancing it from irrational, fantastic forms, which were thereby denigrated as less meritorious or valuable, and less politically relevant.26 Or perhaps the problem with admitting the weird lies as much in science as in genre. In A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction (1999), Robert Mighall notes an ontological tension between horror and science: “horror fiction has a generic obligation to evoke fear or suggest mystery” while science “attempts to contain fear and offer a rational explanation for all phenomena.”27 Yet not only do fin-de-siècle weird tales do all these things, they depend on it; they depend, as Timothy Jarvis has argued, on the collapse of the binary distinctions inherent in contrasts between mystery and explanation, or natural and supernatural.28 Weird fiction contests the cultural dominance of positivist science at the fin de siècle. Some rethinking of what we think science is now, as well as what it was then, is going to be necessary in order to escape the clutches of binary categories and the way they appear to fix knowledge, whether of literary modes or of reality. The word “supernatural” poses a problem in the fin-de-siècle context because the premise of such stories is often closely linked to spiritualist and occult discourses that understood all phenomena as “natural,” just sometimes governed by laws we do not yet understand. In the Flaxman Low stories, as Srdjan Smajìc points out, the “frontier of knowledge”

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extends “so far that natural and supernatural cease to be useful descriptors.”29 For “supernatural” to have any meaning, there must be a “natural” against which to define it, and in weird fiction, there is no distinction. In the next section, I explore the borderlands of science that, at the fin de siècle, were undermining old certainties about the “natural” world and the capacities of scientific knowledge. Here, I make a closer examination of weird fiction’s literary history and explore some definitions of its characteristic tropes and affects, all with an eye to its scientific content and its relations with scientific ways of knowing. The word “weird” originally is related to the control of human destiny and can be traced to some of the oldest known examples of European literature, including Beowulf. “A” weird is thus a fate or destiny, its form (curse, prophecy), or one who ordains it—as do the three Fates of classical mythology and the “wyrd sisters” of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c.1606).30 This meaning persisted long enough to be used loosely in this way in the title of M. E. Braddon’s murder mystery sensation novel Wyllard’s Weird (1885). But “weird” also accrued associations of the fantastic and supernatural, becoming a word suggesting “unearthly, eerie; unaccountably or uncomfortably strange; queer, uncanny,” and “out of the ordinary, strange, unusual.”31 Weird affects of this kind emerge in Romantic poetry, texturing S. T. Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1797–1800) and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), while in P. B. Shelley’s Alastor (1816) “weird” describes an atmospheric sound.32 The creep towards “weird” as a literary descriptor is therefore visible, but, as James Machin elaborates, its mid-nineteenth-century uses were ambiguous and it can be hard to tell if the noun or the adjective is meant.33 Luckhurst makes the point that the weird has no “‘lost’ tradition simply waiting to be uncovered. It is not actually there, or only spectrally so”; that spectral tradition is constructed through the weird’s own “pseudobiblia” (it is littered with invented histories and ancient texts) and the tales’ intertextual self-referentiality.34 The weird is something which both is and isn’t really there, appropriately enough. Its literary history, too, is a retrospective creation, beginning in the 1880s. In the late nineteenth century, changing technological and economic conditions of printing and publishing, especially for periodicals, encouraged the production of short speculative fictions.35 In the 1880s, something else happened too. “Weird” started to be paired with “tale” or “fiction” to describe, retrospectively, the work of earlier writers. For example, in 1882, a number of Charlotte Riddell’s best ghost stories were collected as Weird Stories.36 In 1885,

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E. T. A. Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann” (1817) reappeared in a newly translated two-volume collection titled Weird Tales, recommended to “those who desire to explore the dark by-paths (Irrwege) of the human spirit.”37 Similarly, an 1894 Sheridan Le Fanu collection, The Watcher and Other Weird Stories, included earlier work such as “Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter” (1839), and one of several late century Edgar Allan Poe story collections appeared under the title Weird Tales in 1895.38 One new work in this period was Stuart Cumberland’s A Fatal Affinity (1889). Bearing traces of Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), and Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1882), it concerns a series of occult murders perpetrated by a mysterious Indian cult and curtailed by the intervention of a “Brother of the Light.”39 In the examples given so far, “weird” is used to describe an odd, strange, or fantastic story and to hint at (sometimes) the supernatural, spiritual, or occult. It is being used to describe a diverse range of very different texts—ghost stories like those of Riddell, sensation mysteries like Braddon’s novel, uncanny horror tales like Hoffman’s “Der Sandmann,” occult romances like A Fatal Affinity. A Fatal Affinity, though, was subtitled “A Weird Story,” echoing Horace Walpole’s famous presentation of The Castle of Otranto’s second edition (1765) as “A Gothic Story,” which had more or less initiated a new literary craze. By the 1880s, then “weird” was being used to label a type of story, and the project of constructing genres with sets of more or less collectively understood conventions was picked up by 1920s pulp magazines: Amazing Stories for science fiction and Weird Tales for the weird.40 Notably, poems by most of the major Romantic poets featured in Weird Tales —William Blake’s “The Tiger” (1794) appeared in 1926, for example.41 Weird Tales enveloped most of the long nineteenth century, publishing, in its first decade, verse from Blake to Charles Baudelaire, and short stories from Poe to Guy de Maupassant, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells, alongside original new fiction.42 The weird tale underwent, like science fiction, a process of enrolment through which pre-existing writing was gathered together under a new label.43 In this, Lovecraft was instrumental. His fiction and his essays worked to draw weird tales together and identify their shared characteristics. In an oft-quoted passage from “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Lovecraft wrote:

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The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain – a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.44

Terrible ontological dread, inexplicable forces beyond human knowing— here, Lovecraft distances the weird tale from the trappings of conventional gothic fiction and ghost stories, suggesting it as something new, distinct, more seriously terrifying. Machin makes the important point that few, if any, definitions of the weird are other than variations on this quotation, which articulates the weird vividly without tying it down.45 Nevertheless, for my argument about weird fiction’s relationship with science, it is worth drawing particular attention to a couple of features: the emphasis on the limits of human knowing and the questionable stability of “laws of Nature.” What makes these qualities distinctively weird, when similar claims could be made of the gothic? In Gothic, Fred Botting suggests that if knowledge is associated with rational procedures of enquiry and understanding based on natural, empirical reality, then gothic styles disturb the borders of knowing and conjure up obscure otherworldly phenomena or the “dark arts,” alchemical, arcane and occult forms normally characterised as delusion, apparition, deception. Not tied to a natural order of things as defined by realism, gothic flights of imagination suggest supernatural possibility, mystery, magic, wonder and monstrosity.46

Plausibly a “gothic style,” weird also troubles the “borders of knowing.” However, like science fiction it characterises its “otherworldly phenomena” as real, not supernatural. Jarvis suggests that the treatment of borders is what distinguishes weird from gothic: where gothic works to reinscribe borders, weird collapses them.47 In their place, the “natural” order of things is not transgressed so much as recreated. Weird and gothic modes are allied, but as critical lenses they make for different readings of texts. The weird cannot be subsumed into gothic frameworks, as Botting notes by remarking that “Gothic forms and effects are too limiting for Lovecraft’s mode of writing […] Stories that begin in

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gothic guise escalate into fantastic and extreme horrors.”48 This is true of much fin-de-siècle weird; Hodgson’s House on the Borderland, for example, looks gothic and is presented, like Walpole’s Otranto, as an authentic manuscript that has been rediscovered and prepared by an editor. It is complete with an oppressive, uncanny building and an unreliable narrator haunted by a past loss, but its bizarre Swine-creatures, time travel sequences, and dreamy cosmic journeys burst that gothic frame. It is gothic, but gothic alone is not enough to account for it. This novel is also horror; it is also supernatural; it is also science fiction; in name and content, it is a “borderland” tale: it is weird. China Miéville, for one, sees such genre bleed as critically valuable, enabling fantasy to provoke questioning of the world rather than retreat from it.49 Miéville picks up where Botting leaves off, arguing that weird breaks radically with gothic and is “not just post-it, but is crucially antiit.” He asks: “If a ghost is the enfigured monstrous of the uncanny, an inadequately battened-down guilt-function, what is Cthulhu?”50 To address this, Miéville counterposes the weird to the “hauntological,” which is “the recurrence of that which we know and wish we did not” (and what cannot account for Cthulhu, neither known nor fully knowable).51 He proposes that the weird is not uncanny but “abcanny”; its monsters are the “teratological expressions of that unrepresentable and unknowable, the evasive of meaning.”52 The weird draws on the past— Old Ones dormant for millennia in Lovecraft’s work, ancient worlds of cults, pagan gods, and “Little People” in Machen’s—but these histories and entities don’t depend on “the return of any repressed” or use “gothic’s strategy of revenance”; instead, the weird “back-projects their radical unremembered alterity into history, to en-Weird ontology itself.”53 In the storyworlds of weird tales, things that are new, unknown, and cannot be explained in relation to human concerns are being encountered for the first time, but yet have always existed, abhistories in which time, space, and the past are radically reconstructed in unfamiliar ways. Weird encounters, then, derive from other times, places, or dimensions. “[T]he one test of the really weird,” Lovecraft continued in “Supernatural Horror,” is simply this – whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.54

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For this, Lovecraft is credited with introducing “cosmic horror” into speculative fiction, while the affect he describes is visible in many of the works he covers in this essay. Weird entities or events are not caused by human thought or action (although they may be found by them), and they do not operate within moral schema. They are attempts to “think about, and to confront the difficult thought of, the world-without-us,” which is, in Thacker’s formulation, the world with the human “subtract[ed]” from it. Calling it hostile attempts to comprehend it in human terms as a “worldfor us,” while calling it indifferent recognises the “world-in-itself,” something that obtains without reference to us. The world-without-us “lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific.”55 Yet we are drawn to it because it tells us something about our own limits as we confront it; supernatural horror enables “the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-philosophical language.”56 The Lovecraftian weird universe is a vast, incomprehensible, and indifferent place, without human teleology.57 The weird is nonanthropocentric in the sense that its horrors are not punishments or judgements; that would be impossible in the world-without-us and given “that in the real fabric of the cosmos we are but the slightest insignificant thread.”58 The original meaning of the word weird has now flipped entirely; rather than facing a ready-woven destiny, Miéville observes, we are confronted with its unravelling: “[t]he fact of the Weird is the fact that the worldweave is ripped and unfinished. Moth-eaten, ill-made. And that through the little tears, from behind the ragged edges, things are looking at us.”59 Weird is not a consolatory form; it replaces a fatalistic totality with a cosmos decidedly not organised around the fulfilment of human narratives or fantasies. The “evils” of weird fiction are amoral and generalised forces; the narratives are not arranged around a binary of good and evil or according to a moral code. The menacing entities hovering around Hodgson’s Night Land or ushered into human bodies by Machen’s Dr. Raymond in The Great God Pan and Dr. Black in “The Inmost Light” (1894), for example, simply are; monsters are “innocently going about the business of being monsters.”60 The narratives’ moral judgements may fall on the scientists, but not on the monsters they unleashed (terrible as her acts are, it is not Helen Vaughan’s fault that she is how she is). Science is implicated in this amoral construction of terror and often (as in The Night

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Land) is explicitly blamed for unleashing it; or rather, a certain version of science is blamed, as I’ll come to shortly. One effect of a spreading materialist worldview was to undermine a sense of cosmic teleology, and in the weird, there is no moral guide to replace it, though often it is sought. For Mark Fisher, this effect is “eerie” (a mode he sees as distinct, though related to weird, and which I will for now fold into it), a state particularly bound up with questions of agency and characterised by “a failure of absence” or “a failure of presence.”61 Fin-de-siècle sciences regularly generated such failures and produced eerie conditions. The loss or failure of presence of a consolatory human destiny, however, doesn’t have to mean despair, but may prompt new ways of finding meaning in the world. Weird tales can also be motivated by an urge to convey “the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy.”62 Implicit in the weird aesthetic is the potential for the phenomena breaching natural law to generate admiration and wonder, even if they might turn out to be insanely terrifying. Machen and Blackwood both understood the normal world to be concealing a miraculous and potentially ecstatic reality and it is only in some of their writings that this turns to horror. In Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” (1912), for example, Sophia Bittacy struggles against the seductive, terrifying “Collective Consciousness of the Forest” that consumes her husband, experiencing the sound of the trees as “a spell of horrible enchantment. They were so mild, each one alone, yet so terrific in their combination.”63 The story sustains an atmosphere of combined dread and awe, juxtaposing the trees’ remorseless siege of Mrs. Bittacy’s health and sanity with her husband’s dreamy wonder and the bliss of tree-being, as they “tossed their bushy heads beneath the clouds with a wild, delighted shuffling of great boughs.”64 The weird’s openness to the possibility of atmospheres that are expansive and uplifting, even while they are also terrible, produces a useful ambivalence. Narratives are sometimes left unclosed, with the mystery only partially solved or explained, purposely leaving room for strangeness in the world, as something worth keeping as part of reality even if it might be better not to get too close to it. Further, at least in Blackwood’s scheme, nature itself is an actor and the overturning of human assumptions of supremacy and centrality is a progressive ecological move.

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Approaching fin-de-siècle weird fictions as tales of possibility and opportunity offers one alternative to what some have seen as a productive but unduly dominant analytical paradigm of cultural anxiety in which popular Victorian fictions are valuable only or mainly for what they can reveal about nineteenth-century culture.65 The monsters of gothic fiction can embody troubling concerns over gender roles, class structures, or the workings of the mind, for example, but under a weird lens, horrifying figures like Helen Vaughan or the monstrous animals of Wells and Hodgson can also be viewed as “promising monsters”66 ; innovations and developments, albeit ones for which their contemporary world may not be ready. When, and they are not always, weird monsters are physically embodied, their shapes are only partially recognisable. Even when looking like hybrids, like Pratchett’s horse-octopus, they are presented as indescribably different, as new corporeal forms rather than recreations of mythical creatures. The weird’s teratology, as Miéville describes it, renounces all folkloric or traditional antecedents […]. [T]heir constituent bodyparts are disproportionately insectile/cephalopodic, without mythic resonance. The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in “Western” aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture.67

The formless disintegration of the dying Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan and the tentacled weed men and devil-fish of Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907) are examples of this radical monstrous.68 Later, the “gelatinous” form of Cthulhu with its “writhing feelers,” and the transformed body of Wilbur Whateley, whose “odd” arrangement of tentacles “seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system,” follow the earlier split from conventional monstrosity.69 Tentacles are notoriously prominent in depictions of weird monsters (again like Pratchett’s horse-octopus), and “[t]here is never just one tentacle, but many,” making cephalopods, for Thacker, into the epitome of inhuman alterity while also being anthropogenic creations of biological naming and classification.70 Like science fiction, the weird often works closely with whatever are the current dominant knowledge systems, but sits closer to their limits, revelling in rather than avoiding the irrational or implausible. In fantasy

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styles, the impossible does not have to be explained: fantasy is “not real,” although, as James and Mendlesohn point out, some fantasy tales may “have originated from the minds of people whose ideas about the location of the boundary between ‘real’ and ‘fantastic’ were different.”71 One culture’s supernatural may be another culture’s natural, much as nineteenth-century spiritualism explained the existence of a spirit world in rationalised, naturalised terms. As Fisher expresses it, discussing Lovecraft, although “ordinary naturalism – the standard, empirical world of common sense and Euclidean geometries – will be shredded by the end of each tale, it is replaced by a hypernaturalism – an expanded sense of what the material cosmos contains.”72 Weird insists on the material basis of its world; any supernatural-seeming phenomena in weird fiction are but natural phenomena we cannot yet explain or understand. For instance, in Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931), a staggering recreation of knowledge and reality is asserted while incomprehensible mystery is simultaneously maintained. The truths of the cosmos to which Wilmarth is exposed bring him “dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity – never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry.”73 Wilmarth presents what he “learned,” “guessed,” or “was told” as a set of firm truths of which he has been totally convinced, while at the same time these secrets from the edge of sanity remain opaque and withheld from the reader: “I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had fired forth. I guessed – from hints which made even my informant pause timidly – the secrets behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae” (216). “Behind” this screen of language, however, is where the secrets of what, whence, and why remain. Those secrets depend for their awesome terror both on their suggestion of the cosmos as monstrous on a vast scale and on the inability of language to represent those secrets as anything other than hints and secrets. “No other writer,” Graham Harman argues, “is so perplexed by the gap between objects and the power of language to describe them, or between objects and the qualities they possess.”74 The unknowability of the weird is closely tied to its unspeakability. Monstrosity can be “natural” and yet remain terrifyingly mysterious, a real part of the way the world is and a sign that more remains beyond our understanding. Weird monsters are attempts to represent the truly unknown. Operating under laws we can never properly know, understand, or challenge, the most terrible of weird horrors lie beyond our ability to destroy, although they may be

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temporarily contained, evaded, or held off; it is possible to kill Dracula and defeat Sauron, but in his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. Irreducible terrors, radical embodiments, reconstructed abhistories, and reshaped spaces and materials are all characteristics of weird. Fin-de-siècle weird narratives may also retreat from such radical confrontations, but they do stage progressive or subversive possibilities for alternative ways of thinking and being, whether wonderful or terrifying, that can’t be wholly undone. It has been suggested that weird fiction of the early twentieth century represents a parallel to high modernism: a “pulp modernism,” responding to the same cultural crises as high modernism, “shadows the modernist avant-garde and replicates its autocritique of modernity in crisis.”75 William Touponce argues similarly, that in the stories of Dunsany, Lovecraft, and Bradbury “the experience of the supernatural is linked in complex ways to the experience of society under capitalism.”76 In this sense, weird tales offer a different kind of worldly knowledge, using genre to produce it. Fisher points out that “to those of us in a globally tele-connected capitalist world,” forces that are “not fully available to our sensory apprehension” (like capital) nonetheless have very meaningful agency.77 Scientific authority, as we will see, does too. Weird fiction joins other kinds of writing in the attempt to find ways of understanding and representation to cope (or attempt to cope) with changes and shocks to the social world. In this book, I investigate how weird fiction at the fin de siècle offers challenges to forms of hegemony and mastery through its treatments of science, including its uses of radical, weird dimensions discernable within sciences themselves.

Scientific Borderlands In a review of The Great God Pan, the Glasgow Herald declared that: “Nothing more striking or more skilful than this book has been produced in the way of what one may call Borderland fiction since Mr Stevenson’s […] Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.”78 Robert Louis Stevenson died in Samoa in December 1894, and an obituary by Alexander Cargill appeared in a new spiritualist and psychical research journal established the previous year by W. T. Stead: Borderland (1893–1897). Cargill describes Stevenson as “first among the romancers of our time because he dwelt in Borderland.”79 The “borderland,” usually, referred to the spirit world, and Stead expresses complete confidence in it in the Preface to the journal’s first volume:

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If future progress is as steady and rapid as that of the last year, it will be difficult to convince anyone, when the Twentieth Century dawns, that he or she, or any sane citizen, ever seriously doubted the existence of Borderland and the inhabitants thereof.80

Yet Cargill’s use of the past tense suggests that Stevenson “dwelt” there as a living writer, in “our time.” He had reasons to feel this way; Stevenson famously attributed his creative inspiration to “brownies” who visited him in dreams, and in the same issue as Cargill’s obituary, Stead dwells at length on Jekyll and Hyde in an essay titled “The Man of Dreams.”81 Stevenson’s and Machen’s imaginations and literary creations evidently resonated for their contemporaries with the idea of the “borderland”— but neither The Great God Pan nor Jekyll and Hyde are “about” spiritualism, nor, really, psychical research. The Great God Pan involves a piece of brain surgery, and Jekyll and Hyde uses a carefully concocted chemical potion. The effects are legibly spiritual or psychical—Mary communes with “the god Pan” to the loss of her sanity and the birth of a strange offspring, and Jekyll becomes Hyde in body and soul—but in both cases the method is a laboratory experiment, not a séance, and the outcome is horrifying, not consolatory. Séances were regularly subject to the systematic investigations of psychical researchers, but that is not what Jekyll and Dr. Raymond are doing. They both describe their fields as “transcendental”; they are neither conventional scientists nor conventional psychical researchers or spiritualists, though they have leanings towards all three. Their beliefs and methods along with the outcomes of their experiments posit and demonstrate weird versions of reality in which distinctions between the material (or the natural, or scientific) and the immaterial (or the unnatural, or spiritual) collapse. I return to these two books in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3. Weird fiction, “the” Borderland, and borderland science align particularly productively in Jekyll and Hyde and in its wake, but the union originates in much earlier blendings. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The facts in the case of M. Valdemar” (1845), for example, draws on contemporary popular interest in mesmerism to offer a borderland tale hovering on intersections of science fiction and horror.82 As the nineteenth century went on, occult and spiritualist ideas of psychic sensitivity, phenomena of communications from souls surviving bodily death, notions of astral planes, spheres, or journeys, and concepts of mesmerism, vibrations, and electric currents

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increasingly made their way into weird, gothic, and fantastic tales. Margaret Oliphant, Vernon Lee, Le Fanu, and others became particularly known for their ghost stories, but almost every major Victorian writer turned their hand to this short form, including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James.83 Some tales, such as Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil” (1859) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Playing with Fire” (1900), were directly inspired by spiritualism, while others played with different kinds of science. Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” (1872) explores how the effect of a drug (the tea) on the brain produces a demonic hallucination, investigated by Dr. Hesselius, a close ancestor of Carnacki, John Silence, and Flaxman Low, discussed in Chapter 4. Some full-length novels, too, such as Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842) and A Strange Story, and Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds , owe as much to old and new discourses of magic, mesmerism, and occultism as to the ghost story and gothic traditions.84 In A Strange Story, doctor Allan Fenwick is a positivist committed to the hard facts of science and dismissive of anything spiritual or supernatural. Confronting the sinister figure of Margrave, whose apparently occult or magical powers and quest for eternal life threaten the life of Allan’s rather more spiritually sensitive fiancée, Lilian, Allan is led to question his previously fiercely held convictions. This and other novels, including Zanoni and The Coming Race (1871), present Bulwer-Lytton’s ideas about a life force, a kind of mesmeric fluid or energy implicated in survival and physical and social development.85 In A Romance of Two Worlds , the sick heroine seeks healing at the house of the mystic Heliobas and begins a process of spiritual discovery that culminates in an astral journey through the planets of the solar system and beyond to learn the truths about creation. One critic has described Corelli’s novel as a “creative blend of science, paganism, the Hebrew God, and quasitheosophical mysticism.”86 It explicitly promotes a theistic (and gender-equal) account of the universe, reconciled with scientific materialism, drawing on ideas around hypnotism and electricity incorporated into the discourses of the occult revival. Both novels engage with contested, borderland scientific ideas in order to question assumptions about ways of knowing the world; A Strange Story leaves questions open, while A Romance of Two Worlds works to affirm a new spiritual worldview over one based solely in scientific fact. These are novels stimulated by recurring conflicts and potential reconciliations in British nineteenth-century culture around the nature of matter,

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the place of spirituality and religious faith, the relative determinacy of body and mind, and the methods and ways of knowing the answers.87 In part, this nineteenth-century conversation responds to seventeenthcentury Cartesian philosophy, which set up lines of division between human beings and the rest of the material world; mind was distinct from body, and superior to it, establishing “the idea of reality as a dichotomy between matter and spirit.”88 The male mind, in particular, was associated with rational thought, while constructions of the female remained associated with nature, superstition, and irrationality.89 A hierarchy was established that has never really been overturned, in which rational scientific principles could be used to explain the world mechanically and bend “nature” to the service and dictates of humankind. For example, Enlightenment efforts to classify and understand abnormal births in humans and animals contrasted sharply with early modern constructions of “monsters” and “freaks” as portents or curios.90 Changes in attitudes to superstition and the supernatural may partly explain the weird’s acquisition of its second meaning of “strange.” Supernatural influence over destiny was a part of the fabric of early modern worldviews in the Jacobean period in which Macbeth was first performed91 ; the Enlightenment’s valorisation of reason over superstition, however, would oust “wyrd” from the modern construction of reality, marginalising it as odd, strange, fantastic, unaccountable. From here, nineteenth-century science became the guide to all reasoning and will provide the answers to all the questions which can reasonably be asked; behind it lay the faith that the answers given in the sciences were independent of time and place; that they were truths, and that a scientific method led to certitude.92

From this perspective, knowledge and truth can exist absolutely; the world is amenable to being understood, and positivist science showed the path. The existence of the kinds of borderlands in which weird fiction flourishes depends upon this prevailing perspective; in worldviews without gulfs between magic and reality (or between “supernatural” and “natural”), there is no space for borderlands. Yet, Sarah C. Alexander argues, “the story of the Victorians as steeped in scientific empiricism, committed to materialism and devoted to literary realism ignores important strains

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of thinking that privileged the spaces between the material and immaterial in the physical sciences, social sciences and literature.”93 Not all sciences were materialist, while spiritualism was often presented as inherently empirical. Shane McCorristine suggests that “instead of reading spiritualism and the occult as responses to things, we can take the alternative perspective of seeing the engagement with supernatural other worlds as discoveries which ran alongside secularization and scientific naturalism.”94 At stake was the question of the validity of different kinds of knowledge; borderlands existed in the gaps between confidence that the scientific method led to truth and establishment of what that truth was. Following the work of philosopher Karl Popper, who argued in the 1930s that empirical science is demarcated by its falsifiability rather than its verification, it has become recognised that “no scientific theory is incontestably true” (though on a practical level, like effects of gravity, they may be undoubtable).95 In this sense, and the argument was used by Madame Blavatsky and others, there was enough room for doubt and contestation within accepted science anyway to give occult knowledge a fighting chance.96 Theosophist Annie Besant explained that “Theosophy accepts the method of science – observation, experiment, arrangement of ascertained facts, induction, hypothesis, deduction, verification, assertion of the discovered truth – but immensely increases its arena.”97 The extended arena, though, was where problems battled it out. Developing schools of science were differentiated, as Thomas Kuhn describes it, “not by failure of method—they were all ‘scientific’—but by […] their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practicing science within it.”98 The existence of a more-than-visible spirit world or astral plane was supported by more-than-visible evidence (Besant calls it “super-physical”). Such forms of evidence didn’t sit comfortably with prevailing empiricist models, yet occultists sought to work with them anyway, in hopes of making their version of truth unequivocally acceptable in the same way as other emergent scientific claims.99 If knowledge progressed incrementally and by accumulation, occultism and psychical research could do it as much as botany. Occultists and spiritualists displayed and asserted what they knew in periodicals like Borderland, Light , The Spiritualist , The Theosophist, and Two Worlds.100 Blavatsky’s method of constructing authority in The Secret Doctrine (1888), for example, is to saturate the text with scientific language, strategically blending regular references to well-known scientists from Newton onwards alongside occult writings.101 The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR),

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for their part, accumulated numerous reports, articles, and case studies on phenomena from thought-transference and spirit manifestation to water divining and haunted houses. Henry Sidgwick, in one of his first presidential addresses to the SPR, in 1883, emphasised the society’s “scientific spirit” and “desire to bring within the realm of orderly and accepted knowledge what now appears as a chaos of individual beliefs.”102 Science, indeed, had an obligation to investigate spiritual and psychical phenomena; William Crookes saw it as “the duty of scientific men who have learnt exact modes of working to examine phenomena which attract the attention of the public.”103 As for how to do it, empiricism was the obvious, if not only choice. Our view from a twenty-first-century perspective on what valid knowledge can be is textured by a century or more of epistemological diversification under the influence of the social sciences.104 For most of the nineteenth century, however, positivism dominated over other forms of knowledge, and amid the advance of science, “[t]he loopholes for spirit were closing rapidly.”105 A scientific construction of the world either had to include God and all the mysteries of creation, or allow something to remain beyond the current reach of human minds and instruments, or else there was no God, only matter. For some, solutions lay in the reconciliation of religious faith with physical facts and principles, prompting accounts such as Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart’s The Unseen Universe (1875), into which “the authors pitch all the normally invisible manifestations of energy – radiation, electricity, and heat – and so create a modal allegorical cosmos, a bifurcated world that equivocates at all points between physical and metaphysical realms.”106 Science, then, did not have to do away with God, souls, and the afterlife, but could be used to explain and prove at least some aspects of spiritual existence and establish its material basis. At root was a simple adjustment of what was conceived as “natural,” or indeed “material.” The more-than-visible world was as natural as the normal one and could interact with it, communicating through a medium or even taking on matter from the medium’s body. What was spiritual was not necessarily immaterial: according to Besant, “all living things act in and through a material basis, and ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are not found disassociated.”107 The kinds of physical propositions offered by The Unseen Universe could be used to rationalise the spirit world, the multiple planes that made up Theosophy’s conception of reality, and the ten Kabbalistic worlds of the Order of the Golden Dawn.108 With all this going on, even the SPR, populated with respected scientists, had to defend its area of

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enquiry against what one member described as the “barbed-wire entanglement of hostile human prejudice”—in other words, against those who saw psychical research as at best a “pseudoscience,” dressing up indefensible superstitious belief in the language of science.109 Yet phenomena of spirit manifestation or communication at a distance were contested not only by those who thought them nonsense but also by those (such as Machen) who believed that taking a scientific approach to wondrous phenomena was misguided in the first place. Elana Gomel considers spiritualism as doomed to failure because of its attachment to conventional science, fatally underscored by “a schism within its own defining concepts […] in the oxymoronic view of materiality, expressed in the movement’s defining trope of ‘natural supernatural’.”110 This problem extends through occultism. So while William Kingsland claimed Theosophy as “a Higher Science, which is also Religion in its truest sense, and which deals with the hidden forces in nature at which Physical Science stops short,” this new kind of science was hobbled by the problems of using conventional empiricism with an epistemology fundamentally at odds with it or, as Janet Oppenheim puts it, of using the spaces, methods, and language of experimental science to “grop[e] for a knowledge that was beyond the scope of physical science to either confirm or deny.”111 In this sense, Theosophists shared, with spiritualists and psychical researchers, physicists and psychologists, an understandable reluctance to accept the definitive establishment of a blind, mechanical universe, in which no special teleology distinguished human beings from other animate matter.112 For historian Alex Owen, however, religious doubt and the search for “consolation or meaning in an otherwise bleakly materialistic world,” while important, do not fully explain the fin-de-siècle interest in hermetic occultism and its differences from mid-century spiritualism.113 For Owen, the popularity of occultism at the fin-de-siècle reflected a renegotiation of belief in an increasingly rationalised world—less a way to cope with the implications of materialism through deference to its worldview and adoption of its reasoning than a forging of a new understanding of the world that “re-enchanted” it, maintaining its wondrous dimensions.114 In this way, fin-de-siècle occult movements borrowed reasoning from science while offering alternatives to conventional Christian teachings, constructing themselves as uniquely suited to a more secular and scientific modernity in need of new ways of seeing the world’s marvellousness.

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Either way, the urge towards an alternative sense-making was not limited to science and occultism, nor even to fantastic fictions. Victorian realist writers, George Levine has argued, were also engaged in an effort to “rediscover moral order,” in a century whose scientific, philosophical, and political tumult could provide no firm confidence in reality underpinning literature.115 One did not have to believe in spirits or reject positivism to recognise that the secrets exposed by science could be scary: while one might have faith in reason and […] believe that organized science, at least, could lay bare the structure of the universe and eventually codify all of the “laws of nature,” what those structures or laws were – the truths revealed by science – could be highly disturbing, even nightmarish.116

The new truths of fin-de-siècle science included material and temporal nightmares. Evolutionary theory, for example, positing the shared ancestry of all life on earth, ran counter to the Christian divine creation myth and threatened its core tenets.117 Thermodynamics, whose second law told a story about the gradual death of the universe through the dissipation of energy, seemed to undermine the prospect of either afterlife or human civilisation’s earthly survival.118 Weird fictions relish the imaginative borderlands generated by these revelatory new ways of thinking. The natural and physical sciences upset the stability of a divinely ordered universe even as they pointed a way towards re-ordering it through the establishment of its natural laws. For the most part, the question was what that re-ordering looked like, not whether there were such laws governing the universe in a reliably uniform, meaningful way. Weird fictions, however, create incomprehensible universes that don’t make meaningful sense; or, they force acceptance of a much more limited state of knowledge, or of multiple states that cannot be simultaneously held by one person. These stances challenge assumptions of human intellectual superiority, capacity to know, mastery over nature, and teleological centrality in the cosmos. As far as that goes, weird fiction is in keeping with the fragmentary state of knowledge at the fin de siècle.119 The limits of conventional scientific methods and reasoning for revealing order in the secrets of nature were exposed in the late nineteenth century by, for example, the inadequacy of biological determinism to explain human psychology, or the puzzling discoveries in physics that would lead to the bizarre invisible world of quantum mechanics, as I discuss in later

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chapters. The reason Blavatsky saw “no possible conflict between the teachings of the occult and so-called exact science” was not because occult science was exact but because “Official Science” (as she calls it) wasn’t as exact as it sometimes presented itself anyway.120 The “radical empiricism” of the new psychology of the 1880s, for example, “transcended the traditional barrier between positivism and anti-positivism.”121 This is where Jarvis sees the “topos of a collapsed occult/science binary” arising from the combination of scientific treatment of the occult alongside turns towards occultism as an alternative to the predominant positivist mode.122 For if spiritualism and other occult movements had endeavoured to become more scientific, science was also becoming more occult. Increasing specialisation and professionalisation of sciences themselves made them less accessible and more “occult” to lay audiences, while the enigmatic workings of modern technology could seem as obscure as those of the séance.123 Historian of science Richard Noakes has pointed out that telegraphy could look not so different from spiritualism, given that both presented invisible communication at distance.124 The late nineteenth century’s “new” physics of atoms, X-rays, and more-than-visible forces was not only marvellous and so far little understood, but could be hard to tell apart from theories proposed by psychical researchers—not least because concepts like the luminiferous ether were used by both. “Like atoms, like suns, like galaxies, our spirits are systems of forces which vibrate continually to each other’s attractive power,” wrote F. W. H. Myers in 1903, conflating energy, atomic physics, astronomy, and magnetism in a single account of disembodied communication.125 These ideas all describe or populate the more-than-visible world, the “something beyond that which is visible” that Tait and Stewart called the Unseen Universe.126 In theory, if unseen worlds of microbes, atoms, and energy could be real and true without being empirically verifiable or totally understood, governed by laws as yet undiscovered, why not unseen worlds of spirits? That said, it was not entirely settled whether energy and atoms were “real.” Blavatsky, needling at physicists and chemists in The Secret Doctrine, wrote that “Science has first to learn what are in reality Matter, Atom, Ether, Forces. Now, the truth is that it knows nothing of any of these, and admits it.”127 Such mysteries conveniently left plenty of room for Theosophy to be correct, but were, too, contested in mainstream science. From the empirical perspective, atoms and forces were problematic because they could not be observed. For some, these abstract concepts were “the means by which observational facts may be better described,”

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for others they were the ends, representing “the true reality behind the phenomenon.”128 Physicist Ernst Mach, for example, held that the atom was a “mental artifice […] a product especially devised for the purpose in view. Atoms cannot be perceived by the senses; like all substances, they are things of thought.”129 Other physicists, however, understood this more-than-visible world to be the objectively “real” world, in contrast to the everyday one experienced by people through their normal senses.130 For “despite its reputation, ‘materialistic’ is precisely what 19th-century physics was not. Instead of taking matter to be the fundamental stuff that the world is made of, physicists were driven by an attempt to find out what matter itself really was.”131 Nevertheless, the invisibility of the subjects of theoretical physics made it more reliant on analogy and metaphor compared to predominately empirical, observational sciences such as botany. The imagination of physicists gave us Maxwell’s demon, Schrödinger’s cat, and now-familiar diagrammatic representations of atoms like suns circled by spinning electrons like planets. Approached the other way, the imaginative qualities of fiction mean that narratives have the capacity to theorise physical ideas, as the following chapters will elaborate.132 My final weird scientific borderland lies in biology. The impact of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) on nineteenth-century literature and culture is well documented.133 By presenting species (including humans) as existing in a constant state of adaptation to environmental conditions instead of as static, divinely created forms, evolution by natural selection made imaginable an almost limitless variety of animal shapes—of which late nineteenth and early twentieth-century writers often made use to justify bizarre monstrous forms as “natural.”134 Remote and mysterious environments like oceans, jungles, polar regions, and even the upper atmosphere and the moon made favourite locations for new monstrous animals, often modelled on insects, aquatic invertebrates, and, of course, cephalopods. Even real, known species such as amphibians, carnivorous plants, and fungi existed in biological borderlands because they transgressed conventional distinctions between landdwelling and water-dwelling, or the animal and plant kingdoms. In weird, sf, and gothic tales, as in Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ , Wells’s “The Sea Raiders” (1896), Conan Doyle’s “The Horror of the Heights” (1913), or Frank Aubrey’s “The Devil-Tree of El Dorado” (1896), the encounter between humans and unexpected species is usually antagonistic.135 George Levine, however, stresses the wonder in

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nature that Darwin showed in Origin of Species and other works; Darwinism itself represents a form of secular re-enchantment, showing a world “not mechanical and drained of meaning, but thrillingly fluid and transformative, unpredictable – and thus at least always slightly mysterious, and yes, poetic.”136 A Darwinian world was not only a creative, imaginative space, but was already weird. The strange animals encountered in fin-de-siècle weird fiction inspire awe at their bodily strangeness as well as disgust, fear, and hostility and show that the terrestrial, visible world too, was far less known and stable than it supposedly should be. As well as possibilities for physical shape, attitudes to animal intelligence underwent a shift in the late nineteenth century as a consequence of developments in psychology. Animal intelligence in the Victorian period, historian Rick Rylance explains, was understood as “absolutely different in kind from human intelligence. But the acknowledgement that animals may have any kind of intelligence at all admits a leakage from the new conceptual world [of psychology].”137 This small but radical recognition alters relations between humans and animals on psychological as well as biological levels. It opens the way to imagining weird entities who could possess an intelligence of an utterly different kind from humans, but perhaps equal to it in degree, or even exceeding it. Weird tales revel in the awesome terrors, physical and cerebral, that might dwell in the borderlands of science. Predicated on the presence of forces or entities outwith the limits of the normally knowable world, weird fiction questions assumptions that accessing the other world is necessarily desirable and that what is found there is necessarily benign. The “Borderland” of Hodgson’s House on the Borderland, for example, is no simple home of patient human souls, but a suitably weird dimension allowing access to the monstrous extents of time and space (see Chapter 6). Finde-siècle weird fiction is fascinated by science, but can also critique its limitations. It allows room for or even welcomes the unknown and unexpected, and for uncertainty and unanswered questions, however frightening or awesome these might be, or perhaps especially when they are.

` Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle In this book, I conceive weird fiction as a literature of borderland science. In its fin-de-siècle forms, the weird tale arises because scientific discourses had murky edges, because the limits of knowledge and the extent of what was or wasn’t possible in the world were unclear, because the

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boundaries of valid scientific enquiry itself were not stable. Weird fictions flourish in gaps in knowledge or beyond its edges. As the following chapters will elaborate, some tales attack positivist or materialist science, and some explore alternative, enweirded epistemological terrains that validate abcanny realities. Some tales exploit the gaps and possibilities in materialist science opened up by late nineteenth-century biology and evolutionary theories; some extrapolate from theories of physics, from classic thermodynamics and the “new” physics of unseen, subatomic worlds. All pick up on the strangeness of science, of what is already weird. My case is that weird fiction emerged because of, and could not have emerged without, the particular state of late nineteenth-century biology, physics, psychology, and the scientific discourses constructed around the occult revival—and this is an argument that could be extended into other disciplines (into maths and geometry, for example). Rachel Crossland has pointed out the problems with identifying primacy in either literature or science: whether literature is seen to anticipate or reflect scientific discovery, one or the other must be put first.138 Rather, she suggests, as interwoven parts of the same culture, both science and narrative can be seen as different (though related) ways of thinking about similar topics and problems. This is particularly evident in the way, for example, Wells wrote about xenotransplantation in both The Island of Doctor Moreau and “The Limits of Individual Plasticity” (1895), or in the enthusiasm of psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers for Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. But it is also visible in the way some of Blackwood’s short stories exhibit qualities that, with hindsight, resonate with the then very young field of quantum mechanics: both quantum theory and weird fiction responded to some well-established questions in the nineteenth century about physical phenomena.139 Weird fiction and science belong to the same, widespread cultural conversation taking place at this time about new knowledge and between competing versions of what valid knowledge is. Weird tales not only take part in that conversation but contribute their own versions of knowledge. In the chapters that follow, we visit places where the walls of normality are thinnest. The structure of the book isn’t strictly chronological, but starts with Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Chapter 2. Stevenson (1850–1894), also known for adventure romances like Treasure Island (1881), and Kidnapped (1886), wrote a number of strange or gothic tales around this time, including “Markheim” and “Olalla” (both 1885). Jekyll and Hyde, however, was particularly influential. It has a crucial place

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in the emergence of the weird tale, especially when the weird tale’s emergence is viewed through its entanglement with contemporary scientific practices and philosophies. The novella demonstrates, not least, what was already weird about late nineteenth-century science (in this case, psychology and psychical research) through its representation of Hyde as a character and in the construction of the narrative itself as unstable, eluding secure closure or certainty. The influence of Jekyll and Hyde on the weird tale can be seen in the work of later writers including Arthur Machen (1863–1947) and Edith Nesbit (1858–1924).140 Machen’s weird tales, mystic and supernatural fantasies, and autobiographical writings have attracted increasing critical attention in recent years. Machen now is “widely accepted as a foundational figure […] in the development of modern horror fiction […] a high priest retroactively canonized by later practitioners of his weird art” such as Lovecraft.141 Machen’s ambivalent attitude to science and occultism and his deep commitment to his own mystic worldview inevitably inflect his fiction. Chapter 2 examines some of the weird qualities of Machen’s fiction, particularly The Great God Pan. Dr. Raymond’s experiment demonstrates the dangers of meddling in scientific borderlands with only conventional methods and assumptions as tools. His dreadful success causes the weird to irrupt into normal reality, particularly through the figure of Helen Vaughan, who presents, like Hyde, as a weird monster. Chapters 2 and 3 both focus on the figures of doctors and other scientists, and the means by which they attempt to access, understand, or control the borderland and what occupies it. Chapter 3 examines the central role of the senses and the relations between researcher and subject in scientific positivism and in spiritualism, and how tensions between these systems are negotiated in weird tales. The methods and the results of weird experiments defy the nineteenth century’s dominant epistemology, and the narratives construct alternative ways of knowing better suited to a weird ontology. These include Machen’s “The Inmost Light” and Nesbit’s short stories, “The Three Drugs” (1908) and “The Five Senses” (1910). Nesbit is best known for her children’s stories, including The Railway Children (1906) and Five Children and It (1905).142 A prolific writer for nearly thirty years, she also authored a number of weird and gothic tales, collected as Grim Tales (1893) and Fear (1910). Some of these, including “Man-Size in Marble” (1887) and “The Five Senses,” have attracted attention from critics for their feminist qualities and their

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interest in science.143 “The Three Drugs” and “The Five Senses” merit particular attention in the context of the weird tale because of the characteristics they share with their predecessors by Stevenson and Machen, and because of their emphasis on expanded sensory experience as a way of knowing radical weird realities. In questioning what science can explain, weird fictions challenge what science stands for, including its authority as an institution and its implication in projects of domination. Chapter 4, however, looks at stories in which an occult investigator—a weirdfinder—contains or at least explains a weird irruption. Occult investigation is technologised and professionalised in weird tales that attempt to contain the horrors breaking through from the outside. In these detective stories, the mystery is weird or at least believed to be so at first. The sleuth’s expertise manifests variously as esoteric knowledge, occult equipment, or mental powers, as hybrids of the ghost-finding practices and technologies of the Society for Psychical Research and the rituals or experiments of occultism are translated into fiction. Championing the credentials of borderland science, Flaxman Low, John Silence, and Thomas Carnacki are expert figures used to reassert human control over the unknown, and who, like Sherlock Holmes, wield the power of knowledge to explain, categorise, and contain the psychic or occult wonders and terrors experienced by their clients. The Flaxman Low stories were written in collaboration between Kate and Hesketh Prichard, mother and son, and first published under the pseudonyms of E. and H. Heron. The character of Flaxman Low belongs to a healthy swathe of such figures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, following Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius, and is an important predecessor of Blackwood’s John Silence and Hodgson’s Carnacki.144 Blackwood (1869–1951), whose work I also visit in Chapter 6, had a long career and wrote in a great variety of forms, including journalism, radio plays, and children’s stories.145 He travelled widely and lived in Canada and Switzerland as well as in New York and England. Urban and wild locations both colour his fiction. He was an “omnivorous occultist” who belonged to a number of groups at different times and in different places.146 Like Machen, Blackwood believed there was more to spiritual existence than conventional Christian teachings defined, and both were involved with occult movements including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.147 For Blackwood, as his biographer Mike Ashley summarises,

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The “supernatural” was not something magical or unnatural, in the superstitious sense. Everything was “natural” but mankind could no longer see the whole. The world-view of mankind had become diminished, and thus the only way to see the whole was to step beyond the everyday world into the “super-natural.”148

Ashley’s quotation marks indicate the unsuitability I have noted about “natural” and “supernatural” as terms in this context. As a result, in Blackwood’s fiction, horror is only one possible result of a human character learning to experience the wholeness of the world. While the characters in “The Willows” (1907) do undergo terrifying experiences, in the John Silence stories, the expert figure of the psychic doctor functions as a negotiator making it possible to “see the whole” without being overwhelmed by horror. David Punter has observed that chilling the blood “was not [Blackwood’s] main concern,” and admits to “shy[ing] away” from applying the term “gothic” because “Blackwood occupies, in my opinion, a strangely oblique position in relation to the Gothic.”149 That oblique position, as Punter’s geometric language invites, is weird, a term to capture the borderland qualities of the relations in Blackwood’s stories between human and nature, material and spiritual, ecstasy and terror. The final section of Chapter 4 explores the Hodgson stories collected as Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, and their deployment of occult knowledge derived from esoteric texts updated in combination with modern technology to investigate and (sometimes) to solve or explain weird mysteries. As a young man, Hodgson’s first career was as a sailor in the Merchant Marine, followed by a stint as a bodybuilding teacher in Blackburn, Lancashire, before he turned concertedly to writing from the 1900s until the Great War, in which he was killed in 1918.150 Many of Hodgson’s novels and stories are set at sea, and many, too, exhibit an interest in contemporary science, including energy physics and psychical research.151 “Few can equal him,” Lovecraft wrote, “in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities.”152 Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, along with The Night Land and The House on the Borderland discussed in Chapter 6, generates situations in which the walls of the world grow thin or split entirely and presupposes, in Lovecraft’s words, “lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life.”153 In the tales explored in Chapter 5, however, Hodgson’s weird beings are terrestrial products. This chapter examines weird embodiments in the

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context of borderlands of biological science represented by nineteenthcentury physiology and cryptogamy. Hodgson and H. G. Wells (1866– 1946) both produced innovative animal monsters in new, unknown shapes defying familiar taxonomies. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, “The Derelict” (1907), and “The Voice in the Night” (1912), monstrous creatures are presented as real theoretical, if extreme, possibilities. Moreau’s Beast People and Hodgson’s mould and fungus creatures belong to terrestrial environments; they are weird, non-human life forms springing from the material potentiality of biological borderlands. The narratives are set in remote locations in which the usual expectations of evolutionary mechanisms, animal body shape, and distinctions between humans and non-humans can be reimagined and scientific knowledge can be reinvented. All three narratives work to destabilize assumptions about the nature of life and consciousness, as monstrous vitality, by human or by its own agency, overwhelms taxonomical boundaries and recreates life in weird forms. The stories’ seas and islands are heterotopic spaces in which weird versions of reality can be constructed within the visible, known, material, physical world. Chapter 6 examines stories in which the protagonists accidentally encounter the weird, in remote locations where the walls of the visible world are thin, frayed, or torn. Blackwood’s “The Willows” and Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland and The Night Land revel in the narrative potential of the borderland and the dissolving boundaries of the known material world it suggested. This chapter outlines how the laws of thermodynamics in the mid-to-late nineteenth century helped to inspire physical rationales for the other world on the basis that dissipated energy had to be conserved somewhere, thus counteracting the inevitable entropy and solar heat-death otherwise predicted as earth’s future. Hodgson’s extraordinary The Night Land is an eschatological romance set in a sunless future earth millions of years after solar heat-death. Like The Time Machine, it uses vast lengths of geological time to imagine the long-term implications of evolution and thermodynamics for the future of humanity and the material (and any other) world. Boundaries between dimensions weaken, and strange new hostile entities—in the forms of physical monsters and invisible forces—menace the remains of human civilisation. Nevertheless, The Night Land and The House on the Borderland, infused with occult tropes and principles, seek to imagine ways in which humans can understand their existence as meaningful despite facing a vast and indifferent material universe. In “The Willows,” interactions between our world

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and another become legible in the context of heat engines and energy exchange as weird terrors increase in power at the expense of humans. Blackwood’s short stories also reflect a new uncertainty about reality partially spurred by the way the new physics opened up the invisible inner world of atoms as well as invoking invisible forces, ultimately paving the way for quantum mechanics and its accompanying instabilities. The weird, in Miéville’s words, grew out of a “burgeoning sense that there is no stable status quo but a horror underlying the everyday.”154 Open to the unknown, the wondrous, and the terrifying, the weird favours unstable, usually alarming versions of reality that run counter to the prevailing nineteenth-century positivist account of the world as something amenable to human understanding and about whose phenomena rational intellectual processes and empirical methods will reveal sure truths and natural physical explanations. Nineteenth-century sciences were asking questions about how the world could be understood, and finding or at least seeking answers. Weird tales asked such questions too, using the imaginative freedom of fiction to present answers from the extremes of wonder and terror in storyworlds that could treat them as if they were real. The weird fictions discussed in this book prise open spaces in the borderlands of fin-de-siècle sciences and explore their narrative potential. They are at root tales of terror, variants of ghost stories and akin to gothic, and they glory in the fresh possibilities for fearful atmosphere, novel monstrosity, and awesome wonder offered to speculative fiction by science. Weird fiction deserves recognition on its own terms. Clustering the texts of this book together as weird offers fresh insights to how these kinds of story could respond to science and intervene in the cultural and philosophical questions and debates it raised at the fin de siècle. Weird tales flourish at intersections between literary modes, where they imagine the world differently. They react to changing ways of understanding generated by scientific exploration, considering how their implications might be experienced by individuals in the present, projected into the future, and reconciled with competing worldviews. The borderlands of fin-de-siècle science were pivotal for the emergence of the weird and shaped its contribution to the development of speculative fictions thereafter.

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Notes 1. Terry Pratchett, Sourcery (London: Gollancz, 1988), 250. 2. William Hope Hodgson, “The House on the Borderland,” in The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002); Terry Pratchett, “William Hope Hodgson: The House on the Borderland,” in Horror: 100 Best Books, ed. Stephen Jones and Kim Newman (London: Carroll and Graf, 1988), 72–73. 3. Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan,” in The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (London: John Lane, 1894), 12; Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2003), 56. 4. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story (London: Sampson Low, 1862), 148; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” in Selected Writings, ed. David Galloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 537. 5. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 1996), 34; see Maurice Hindle, “‘Vital Matters’: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Romantic Science,” Critical Survey 2, no. 1 (1990). 6. For the development of literature and science as a field, see, for example, Daniel Cordle, Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science and the Two Cultures Debate (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Charlotte Sleigh, Literature and Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 7. Michael Moorcock, “Foreweird,” in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (London: Corvus, 2011). 8. Gothic is often preferred; see, for example, gothic analysis of Stevenson and Wells by Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and of Hodgson and Machen by Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 9. On fin-de-siècle weird fiction, see, for example, James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); on the New Weird, see Alice Davies, “New Weird 101,” SFRA Review 291 (2010). 10. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6. 11. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 2. 12. See, for example, Mark Fisher, “Memorex for the Krakens: The Fall’s Pulp Modernism,” k-punk (2006); Sherryl Vint, “Introduction: Special Issue on China Miéville,” Extrapolation 50, no. 2 (2009).

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13. S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), 1. 14. China Miéville, “On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Cannies,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 3 (2012), 380. 15. The ecological phrase “more-than-human world” derives from David Abram. See Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1997). 16. Roger Luckhurst, “Where the Weird Is: At the End of the Passage” (presentation, The Weird: Fugitive Fictions/Hybrid Genres, Birkbeck, University of London, November 7–8, 2013). 17. To undertake a disorientation to the weird, see Roger Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017). 18. William Hope Hodgson, “The Night Land,” in The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002), 397. 19. Hodgson, “Night Land,” 398. 20. I am not the first to wonder this; see Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 13. 21. Philip A. Shreffler, The H. P. Lovecraft Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 3. 22. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977), 55. Briggs’s interpretation of “ghost story” is inclusive: she addresses Le Fanu, Machen, Hodgson’s Carnacki stories, and Blackwood’s John Silence stories, among others, but doesn’t identify them as part of a weird tradition. 23. Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1041. See also China Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sheryll Vint (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016); Nick Freeman, “Weird Realism,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017); and Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain. 24. Aaron Worth, “Introduction,” in The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), x. 25. Michael Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story (Springer, 2014); Mark De Cicco, “‘More Than Human’: The Queer Occult Explorer of the Fin de siècle,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 1 (2012). 26. Darko Suvin, “Estrangement and Cognition,” in Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction, ed. James Gunn and Mathew Candelaria (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1979). 27. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxiv. 28. Timothy Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-inItself: Fidelity to the ‘Lovecraft Event’ in the Work of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Laird Barron,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017).

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29. Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 187, italics original. 30. “Weird,” n., Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 2, 6th edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For discussion of the word’s etymology, see also Morton, Dark Ecology; Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 12; and Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1049. 31. “Weird,” adj., def. 2 and 3, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 2. 32. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Verse: A Selection (London: Faber and Faber, 1972); Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude,” in The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), l.30. 33. Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 36. 34. Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1045, 1047. 35. See Joseph McAleer, Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914– 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 36. Charlotte Riddell, Weird Stories (London: Home and Van Thal, 1946). 37. J. T. Bealby, “Biographical Notice,” in Weird Tales by E. T. A. Hoffman (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885), lxxii. 38. Sheridan Le Fanu, The Watcher and Other Weird Stories (London: Downey, 1894); Edgar Allan Poe, Weird Tales (Philadelphia: H. Altemus, 1895). 39. Stuart Cumberland, A Fatal Affinity: A Weird Story (London: Spencer Blackett, 1889). 40. On this process of genre establishment, see Will Tattersdill, Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 41. For discussions of Weird Tales, see Peter Haining, Weird Tales (London: Sphere, 1976); Terence E. Hanley, “Weird Tales from the Romantic Era,” Tellers of Weird Tales, accessed 13 July 2015, http://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/weird-talesfrom-romantic-era.html. 42. Weird Tales was itself “strip-mined” later by anthologised reprints. Candace R. Benefiel, “Shadow of a Dark Muse: Reprint History of Original Fiction from Weird Tales 1928–1939,” Extrapolation 49, no. 3 (2008), 463. 43. Tattersdill, Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press, 12. 44. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Fiction (New York: Dover, 1973), 6–7. 45. Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 2–3; on Lovecraft’s pivotal role in the development of the weird tale, see also Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, especially pp. 16–25. 46. Fred Botting, Gothic, 2nd edn., (London: Routledge, 2014), 2.

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47. Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-in-Itself,” 1140. 48. Botting, Gothic, 167. 49. Tony Venezia, “Weird Fiction: Dandelion Meets China Miéville,” Dandelion 1, no. 1 (2010), para. 17; see Joan Gordon and China Miéville, “Reveling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville,” Science Fiction Studies (2003). 50. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 379. 51. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 380. 52. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 381. Miéville stresses that his use of “ab” derives from “abnormal” and the “abhuman” creations of William Hope Hodgson, rather than from Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. 53. Miéville, “Quantum Vampire,” Collapse IV (2008), 113. 54. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 7. 55. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 5–6. 56. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 2. 57. Jason V. Brock, Disorders of Magnitude (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 14; Burleson, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, 158. 58. Burleson, Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe, 158. 59. China Miéville, “Afterweird: The Efficacy of a Worm-Eaten Dictionary,” in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (London: Corvus, 2011), 1115. 60. Shreffler, The H. P. Lovecraft Companion, 23. 61. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 61. 62. H. P. Lovecraft, “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” The H. P. Lovecraft Archive, accessed 15 February 2019, www.hplovecraft.com. 63. Algernon Blackwood, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” in Pan’s Garden (London: Macmillan and Co., 1912), 91. 64. Blackwood, “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” 98. 65. Christine Ferguson, “From Anxiety to Ecstasy: Arthur Machen, A. E. Waite, and the Mysticist Redemption of Victorian Popular Fiction,” (2014); Mighall, Victorian Gothic. 66. Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” 1054. 67. Miéville, “Quantum Vampire,” 105. 68. William Hope Hodgson, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, in The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002). 69. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” in H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 95, 97; H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” in H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 123. 70. Eugene Thacker, Tentacles Longer Than Night (Winchester: Zero Books, 2015), 150.

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71. Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy (Faringdon: Libri, 2012), 3. 72. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 18. 73. H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness,” in H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 216. 74. Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 3. 75. Venezia, “Weird Fiction,” para. 9. 76. William F. Touponce, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ray Bradbury: Spectral Journeys (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), x. 77. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 64. 78. Quoted in Mark Valentine, Arthur Machen (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan: Seren, 1995), 27. 79. Alexander Cargill, “Our Gallery of Borderlanders: Robert Louis Stevenson,” Borderland 2, no. vii (1895), 12. 80. W. T. Stead, “Preface,” Borderland, Vol. 1 (1894). 81. Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Chapter on Dreams (1888),” in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, ed. Martin A Danahay (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005), 103–5; W. T. Stead, “The Man of Dreams,” Borderland 2, no. vii (1895), 17–24. 82. On Poe’s tales and the terrifying limits of the knowable, see Robert Tally, “The Nightmare of the Unknowable, or, Poe’s Inscrutability,” Studies in Gothic Fiction 1, no. 1 (2010). Weird Tales editor Clark Henneberger aspired to produce “a periodical of modern literature in the Poe tradition” pointing to Poe’s influence on the development of the horror story field broadly conceived (Haining, Weird Tales, 16). 83. On supernatural fiction in this period, see Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story: A Cultural History, 1840–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 84. On Bulwer-Lytton’s contributions to the development of the ghost story tradition, particularly as endeavours to “strengthen the status of the marvellous,” see Mark Knight, “‘The Haunted and the Haunters’: Bulwer Lytton’s Philosophical Ghost Story,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 28, no. 3 (2006), 253. 85. See Allan Conrad Christensen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Fiction of New Regions (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1976). 86. Annette R. Federico, Idol of Suburbia: Marie Corelli and Late-Victorian Literary Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 131. 87. For excellent discussions of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism, psychical research, science, technology, and literature, see, for example, Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical

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88.

89. 90.

91.

92. 93. 94.

95.

96.

97. 98.

Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Anne Stiles, “Introduction,” in Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920, ed. Anne Stiles (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3; René Descartes, Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (London: Penguin, 1998); and see also Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (London: HarperCollins, 1980), 1–5. Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Michael Hagner, “Enlightened Monsters,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Stephen Regan, “Macbeth,” in Shakespeare: Texts and Contexts, ed. Kiernan Ryan (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan and The Open University, 2000). David Knight, The Age of Science: The Scientific World-View in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 5. Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015), 7. Shane McCorristine, “Introduction,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 3, Spiritualism and Mediumship, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), xiii. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2002), 17–18; David Kottler, Seven Ways of Knowing (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2010), 50. On relations between science and occultism, including Theosophy specifically, see especially the work of Egil Asprem, e.g. “Science and the Occult,” in The Occult World, ed. Christopher Partridge (London: Routledge, 2014) and “Pondering Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror of Late Classical Physics,” Aries 11, no. 2 (2011). Annie Besant, Theosophy (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1912), 21. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4. Roger Luckhurst and Christine Ferguson have highlighted the importance of recognising the ways in which socalled borderland sciences were understood by their own central figures. Luckhurst, Telepathy; Christine Ferguson, Determined Spirits: Eugenics,

1

99.

100.

101.

102.

103.

104.

105. 106.

107.

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Heredity, and Racial Regeneration in Anglo-American Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Peter Lamont, “Spiritualism and a Mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 4 (2004). Lamont argues that for the Victorians, the question of whether or not psychical phenomena were real not so clear cut as it can appear now in retrospect. See also Richard Noakes, “The Sciences of Spiritualism in Victorian Britain,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Hereafter, I will usually distinguish occultism from positivism rather than from “science,” since both were constructed as “scientific.” Mark S. Morrisson, “The Periodical Culture of the Occult Revival: Esoteric Wisdom, Modernity, and Counter-Public Spheres,” Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 2 (2008). Morrisson demonstrates how instrumental the periodical press was in establishing the authority of occult knowledge. H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, Vol. 1 (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888). Henry Sidgwick, “President’s Address,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 1 (1882), 247; see also Janet Oppenheim, “Physics and Psychic Research in Victorian and Edwardian England,” Physics Today, May (1986). William Crookes, “Spiritualism Viewed by the Light of Modern Science, 1870,” in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (Manchester: Two Worlds Publishing Company, 1926), 7. Theodore M. Porter, “The Social Sciences,” in From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 7. The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); see also Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (London: Athlone, 1996). George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 161. Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart, The Unseen Universe or Speculations on a Future State (London: Macmillan and Co., 1875); Bruce Clarke, “Allegories of Victorian Thermodynamics,” Configurations 4, no. 1 (1996), 85. Anne Besant, Why I Became a Theosophist (1890), quoted in Oppenheim, Other World, 191.

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108. Besant, Theosophy; Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press [SUNY], 2015), 8. 109. F. C. S. Schiller, “On Some Philosophic Assumptions,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 15, 1900–1901 (1901), 64. 110. Elana Gomel, “‘Spirits in the Material World’: Spiritualism and Identity in the Fin-de-Siècle,” Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007), 191. 111. Oppenheim, Other World, 196, 159–60. 112. Oppenheim, Other World, 2, 4; see also De Cicco, “More Than Human,” 6. 113. Owen, Darkened Room, 27; see also Alex Owen, “The Sorcerer and His Apprentice: Aleister Crowley and the Magical Exploration of Edwardian Subjectivity,” Journal of British Studies 36, no. 1 (1997). 114. Owen draws on Max Weber’s discussion of the way intellectual rationalisation “disenchanted” the world by stripping it of wonder and mystery. 115. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 20. See also Freeman, “Weird Realism” on relation between the weird and other modes including literary realism. 116. Patrick Brantlinger, “Introduction: Zadig’s Method Revisited,” in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain, ed. Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), xviii. 117. Ian Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 118. For full discussions of thermodynamics, see Ted Underwood, The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Economy, 1760–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Brantlinger, “Introduction: Zadig’s Method Revisited”; and Barri Gold, Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 119. Christine Ferguson, “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment,” PMLA 117, no. 3 (2002). 120. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, Vol. 1, 487; Egil Asprem, “Theosophical Attitudes Towards Science: Past and Present,” Handbook of the Theosophical Current 7 (2013). 121. David F. Lindenfeld, The Transformation of Positivism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 79. 122. Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-in-Itself,” 1138. 123. Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006). 124. Richard Noakes, “Telegraphy Is an Occult Art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the Diffusion of Electricity to the Other World,” History of Science 32, no. 4 (1999), 422.

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125. Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 282. 126. Their book in turn gives its name to Pratchett’s Discworld’s Unseen University. 127. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, Vol. 1, 482, italics original. 128. Lindenfeld, Transformation of Positivism, 81, italics original. 129. Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, trans. Thomas J. McCormack (London: Watts & Co., 1893), 492. 130. See Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 131. Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror of Late Classical Physics,” 141, italics original; see also David B. Wilson, “A Physicist’s Alternative to Materialism: The Religious Thought of George Gabriel Stokes,” in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain, ed. Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 132. On physicists and imagination, see Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 133. See, for example, Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Boston: Ark Paperbacks, 1985); Levine, Darwin and the Novelists. 134. Hurley, Gothic Body; Kelly Hurley, “The Modernist Abominations of William Hope Hodgson,” in Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 135. On The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’, see my “(Re)encountering Monsters: Animals in Early-Twentieth-Century Weird Fiction,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017). On anthropophagic trees, see Cheryl Blake Price, “Vegetable Monsters: Man-Eating Trees in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 2 (2013). 136. George Levine, “Reflections on Darwin and Darwinizing,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 2 (2009), 239. 137. Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28. 138. Rachel Crossland, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 139. For a discussion of weird as quantum fiction, see Christina Scholz, “Quantum Fiction!—M. John Harrison’s Empty Space Trilogy and Weird Theory,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017). 140. See David Trotter, “Introduction,” in The Three Impostors (London: Everyman, 1995) for Machen’s acknowledged debt to Stevenson and The Dynamiter (1885).

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141. Worth, “Introduction,” x. 142. See Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit 1858–1924 (London: Penguin, 1987); E. Nesbit’s Psammead Trilogy: A Children’s Classic at 100 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006). 143. Victoria Margree, “The Feminist Orientation in Edith Nesbit’s Gothic Short Fiction,” Women’s Writing 21, no. 4 (2014); Nick Freeman, “E. Nesbit’s New Woman Gothic,” Women’s Writing 15, no. 3 (2008); and Keir Waddington, “More Like Cooking Than Science: Narrating the Inside of the British Medical Laboratory, 1880–1914,” Journal of Literature and Science 3, no. 1 (2010). 144. Briggs, Night Visitors; Sage Leslie-McCarthy, “The Case of the Psychic Detective: Progress, Professionalisation and the Occult in Psychic Detective Fiction from the 1880s to the 1920s” (diss., Griffith University, 2007). 145. Mike Ashley’s biography Starlight Man (London: Constable, 2001) is the best source for Blackwood’s life, travels, and careers. 146. Graf, Talking to the Gods, 81. 147. See Graf, Talking to the Gods for a full account of both authors’ occult interests in relation to their lives and works. Neither, according to Graf, were known as occultists when their work was first published. She points out how rarely occult elements in their work are investigated, despite the fact that the influence of their membership in the Golden Dawn “has become a truism” (3). 148. Ashley, Starlight Man, 53. 149. David Punter, “Algernon Blackwood: Nature and Spirit,” in Ecogothic, ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 45. 150. R. Alain Everts, William Hope Hodgson: Night Pirate: Volume 2. Some Facts in the Case of William Hope Hodgson: Master of Phantasy (Toronto: Soft Books, 1987). 151. See my “The Dark Mythos of the Sea: William Hope Hodgson’s Transformation of Maritime Legends,” in William Hope Hodgson: Voices from the Borderland, ed. Massimo Barruti, S. T. Joshi, and Sam Gafford (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2014); “‘Passing the Barrier of Life’: Spiritualism, Psychical Research, and Boundaries in William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land,” in Boundaries, ed. Jenni Ramone and Gemma Twitchen (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). 152. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 82. 153. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 82. 154. Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” 510.

PART I

Borderlands of Mind, Body, and Spirit

CHAPTER 2

Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology, and States of Mind in Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Arthur Machen’s 1890s fiction did much to establish the terms of the weird tale in the late nineteenth century. Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan (1890) use scientific ideas to rationalise the generating of a weird monster that then exceeds the capacity of science to know it. The predominant scientific worldview wobbles under its inability to cope and a weird version of what reality is takes its place. These stories, I argue, find weird crevices in nineteenth-century science and prise the cracks open to imaginatively explore what the implications might be. In this chapter, I put a case for reading Jekyll and Hyde as a weird tale. The novella’s instabilities, misdirections, and mysteries produce a text that, like the weird, contests a deterministic, mechanistic, positivist worldview. Hyde always remains unknowable, a representative of realms of existence beyond those of the human, while the novella’s engagement with psychological theories question the knowability of any conscious self. Machen’s fiction delves even further into weird worlds. Encounters— accidental or deliberate—between humans and weird dimensions or their occupants produce awe, wonder, insanity, horror, terror and, potentially, an advanced state of knowledge. Rather than rejecting the current state of scientific knowledge (in favour of fantasy, metaphysics, gothic revenant or supernaturalism), these weird tales rework it, suggesting that different conceptions of “science” or “knowledge” may do better at describing

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Alder, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_2

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reality while still allowing rational (rather than superstitious) scope for the unknown and unknowable lying beyond.

“Ripples Over the Threshold”: The Weird Case of Jekyll and Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson’s most famous story is not usually claimed for the weird—it is more often recruited to the gothic tradition and sometimes to sf.1 Yet, James Machin points out, it was received by contemporary readers as “a ‘weird story’ and a ‘weird novelette’ with a ‘weird hero’, but not a Gothic novelette.”2 Traits critics identify in the novella also mark it as weird even when they don’t call it that. In a centenary essay on the multiple narrative voices of Jekyll and Hyde, Ronald R. Thomas remarks that readers “move through [the] secret door” of Enfield’s story “into a world where names cannot be named, points cannot be reached, stories cannot be told.”3 Thomas’s language here is strikingly weird. It describes a storyworld that resists knowing, while doors themselves, Mark Fisher argues of another fin-de-siècle story, H. G. Wells’s “The Door in the Wall” (1911), are portals, “thresholds leading […] into the weird.”4 Thomas’s description expresses the particular way Jekyll and Hyde’s plot and narration interlock—between them they make it, among other things, a weird tale. Added to this is the problematic figure of Hyde, whose “pathology,” Michael Davis notes, “real enough in its effects on others, is nonetheless ghostly rather than material, somehow present yet simultaneously absent, and so beyond the scope of mapping or diagnosis in physical terms.”5 In these terms, Hyde is a weird force, eerily failing to be entirely absent or present, an invisible agent that nonetheless produces real effects. Jekyll and Hyde can be understood as a weird tale through the way it unfolds an unstable conception of reality—a reality of multiple selves— which (like the ambiguities built into the narrative’s construction) ultimately eludes being fully comprehended or comprehensible. What the novella’s premise has to do with late nineteenth-century science is similarly multiple—evolutionary theory, psychology, psychoanalysis, spiritualism, medical pathology, criminology, sexology, and chemistry are all among the contexts in which a number of absorbing critical studies have read it.6 Davis’s argument, for example, links the instability of the self in Jekyll and Hyde to a “chemical fluidity” that explores relative psychological and physiological contributions to consciousness and identity.7 These scientific borderlands enweird Jekyll and Hyde.

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The radical, new, weird reality that the text demands to have accepted has roots in nineteenth-century psychology and especially in the profound changes the discipline was undergoing in the 1880s—changes that challenged not only assumptions about the nature of human consciousness and selfhood, but also those about the stability and comprehensibility of reality itself. Jekyll and Hyde, I suggest, picks up on the weirdness of this rapidly evolving area of fin-de-siècle science, while also pushing the limits of its implications even further. By the 1880s, the “unshapely, accommodating, contested, energetic discipline” of psychology showed a clear drift towards the firmer rules of experimentalism.8 Such tightening reflected a shift away from understanding the mind predominantly on an intellectual, metaphysical level and towards biological models basing mental health in the body. Modern empirical approaches driving nineteenth-century positivism understood the brain as an organ, its functions (and dysfunctions) observable in physical effects. Nonetheless, Rick Rylance emphasises, Victorian psychology maintained a “discursive turbulence,” remaining a “mosaic always in process of completion.”9 Physiological explanations were not universally accepted. Theosophist Annie Besant, for example, looked back at the last quarter of the nineteenth century from the vantage point of 1912 and complained of the way that ‘‘physiology had captured psychology” to render mental life biologically determinable (from which, of course, Theosophy offered rescue).10 In principle, from different perspectives, many shared Besant’s complaint. The psychologists of the Society for Psychical Research were among those who disputed the limiting of investigation of mental capacities to the methods and epistemologies of the physical sciences. F. W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney both recognised multiple levels of consciousness; the ego as a concept was in circulation well before Freud and provided a way to describe consciousness that released it from reductive, psychophysiological models.11 Without necessarily discounting the value of physiological understandings of the brain, many were convinced they were insufficient on their own. For Henri Bergson, physical determinism offered a tempting logic, but was inadequate and could never be experimentally proved. Critiquing mechanistic, unitary models of the mind, Bergson understood consciousness as, rather, made up of heterogenous states. As he put it in Time and Free Will (1886), we “grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which permeate each

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other.”12 David Lindenfeld explains that for Bergson, psychological atomism couldn’t account for psychic intensity, the emotional nuance that is present in all our mental states, and ebbs and flows in a way that can be neither quantified nor verbalised. Once the preconceptions stemming from outward experience are removed, inner experience reveals itself as a continuous, heterogenous flow of mental states, melting into one another in a way that could not be analysed.13

To theorise a fluid melding of the mind’s pathways and the unanalysable quality of those states is to work against the notion of a knowable, constant self, and so to pose potentially radical challenges to conventional suppositions of a single unified individuality, in control of its thoughts and actions. In place of that coherent self is a conception of human consciousness that sits much closer to that of the weird, open to the possibility of multiplicity and contradiction, resisting stable and absolutely determined answers. Jekyll and Hyde is widely recognised as a text working with psychological ideas about selfhood, personality, and consciousness, and this is where it grows weird. It is a story capturing “the sense of potentialities on the cusp of a reconceptualization of the psyche, where splitting contains multiple and contradictory valences.”14 For Peter Garrett, in Jekyll and Hyde “a plural, disunified model of the self displaces traditional dualities and seems to anticipate the decomposition of the unitary subject” in modern literature.15 In a way, though, this critical work was done for us, almost as soon as the novella was published: that critic was Frederic Myers. Myers and Stevenson corresponded over Jekyll and Hyde, with Myers expressing his admiration for the story and suggesting corrections which Stevenson never chose to take up.16 Although an essay by Myers often connected to Jekyll and Hyde, “Multiplex Personality,” was published in late 1886, a number of his remarks in the later Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) particularly illuminate the implications of borderland psychological theorising for the new capacity at the fin de siècle to conceive identity weirdly. In Human Personality, Myers emphasises both the plurality and the instability of consciousness: “I regard each man as at once profoundly unitary and almost infinitely composite,” he wrote.17 A person may possess multiple subliminal selves, “quasi-independent trains of thought” between which could exist “not

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only co-operations ” but also “upheavals and alterations of personality of many kinds, so that what was once below the surface may for a time, or permanently, rise above it.” These subconscious emergences he called “ripples over the threshold.”18 Ideas of surfaces, thresholds, and interactions across them position mental existence itself as a weird state, neither fixed and stable nor fully knowable, from which inward rather than outward monstrosities might erupt. Jekyll and Hyde, evidently, dates too early to be simply reflecting fin-de-siècle psychological explorations like those of Bergson and Myers. It was cited in medical studies, and Julia Reid argues that a creative dialogue is visible at work between Stevenson and Myers. For Reid, Stevenson’s work “may resist as well as affirm, may even influence, late-Victorian science” and “creative literature […] can intuit truths which are as yet denied to science.”19 Speculative literary modes like the weird have a degree of creative freedom to imagine, or intuit, alternative ways of knowing the world less accessible to mainstream intellectual enquiry in the grip of the dominant nineteenth-century positivism. As a weird tale, Jekyll and Hyde shares this intuitive freedom with the borderlands of late nineteenth-century psychology. Nancy K. Gish, for example, demonstrates connections between Hyde and psychiatric studies of hysteria by Pierre Janet, and makes the point that the story presents multiplicity of consciousness as a normal, not pathological, state; Jekyll’s discourse “both parallels the [hysterical] dissociation theory of [Stevenson’s] time and anticipates recent neo-dissociation theory that assumes originary plurality rather than fragmented unity.”20 By posing the “multifarious polity” of personality as standard, Stevenson’s story demands acceptance of an explanation of the nature of the self that was not part of contemporary orthodox philosophy. Adjusting to a new view of abnormal as normal is challenging, though, since that plural self is not metaphorical or merely mentally internal in this storyworld, but makes an embodied irruption, as Hyde, into contemporary London life, where he both does and does not belong. The novella presents a reconceived version of the self, driven by Jekyll’s central insight that “man is not truly one, but truly two.”21 That reconstituted self is, however, not a stable one—the tempting binary simplicity of the notion of the “double self,” so popularly associated with this story, conceals continually shifting ground. Indeed, Jekyll and Hyde is notable for its eluding of absolute certainties. It appears to encourage speculations about Jekyll’s relationship with Hyde (such as blackmail for illegitimacy

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or homosexuality) only to demolish them later.22 The text occludes the precise nature of the vicious deeds that not only Jekyll but also Enfield, Utterson, and Lanyon are careful and willing to ignore or smooth over.23 The narrative also refuses to pin down who the central character really “is.” Jekyll is shifty on this point and plays the uncertainty to his moral advantage in his so-called Full Statement which, while presenting “the last pieces of the narrative puzzle, […] also works against [his] assertions of duality.”24 As critics have noted, Jekyll’s self-vindicating, apparently innocent welcome of Hyde, that “[t]his, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human,” transforms into a rejection when he needs to distance himself from Hyde the murderer: “He, I say – I cannot say, I. That child of Hell had nothing human” (58, 67).25 Self or other, human or inhuman, Jekyll or Hyde, natural or unnatural: such dualisms litter the text as if they can stabilise the self and fix the story in place with comprehensible binary explanations. Yet the narrative consistently works against such surety until the end. In Chapter 8, for example, Utterson and Poole break into the cabinet and find Hyde’s body in Jekyll’s clothes, inverting Hyde’s function as Jekyll’s “cloak” (59), but whether this death was murder or suicide is unclear. Further, the story “ends” three times, as the documents contributed by Lanyon and Jekyll in Chapters 9 and 10 each provide another version of events. Chapter 10 concludes with the words “I lay down the pen and […] bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end” (70). But who is in control of the pen at this point? This chapter is Jekyll’s “Full Statement,” but as Garrett observes, “[t]he more we ponder its disclosures, the more mysterious and unstable it becomes.”26 The “I” thus far, we suppose, has been Jekyll, but if so, why refer to himself as “that” Henry Jekyll rather than “this”? If Hyde has taken over, as we know he now can without Jekyll taking the potion, at what point did that happen; when did we start reading his words? The figure of the author, too, shadows this final line, adding another textual layer that further undermines certainty right at the narrative’s close by drawing attention to its inherent fictionality. In this way, Jekyll and Hyde constructs a weird narrative reality. Hyde and Jekyll do not so much exist in a dualistic balance as, rather, the only two facets that are presently visible of a profoundly fragmented, pluralistic self. Jekyll and Hyde has become widely known, even among those who have not read the original book, primarily for its trope of the doubled self.27 For Rylance, the story reveals “the persistence of well-worn

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conceptual archetypes” in its binary divisions that follow a nineteenthcentury tendency to treat psychological pathology as “largely an all-ornothing game.”28 But Jekyll’s discovery, or revelation, is really somewhat more troubling, and undermines binary conceptions; he predicts, in language not unlike Myers’s, that “man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens” (56). The binary language of good and evil so often associated with Jekyll and Hyde in fact emerges only from Jekyll—none of the other characters use it.29 Gish relates Hyde to “a theory of a ‘normal’ multiplicity of the self that, in this case, takes the form of a good/evil split.”30 But this binary is normative rather than descriptive, part of Jekyll’s untrustworthy efforts to impose what Jerrold Hogle calls a “grid of intelligibility” on his relations with Hyde rather than being an accurate expression of what they actually are.31 Jekyll’s problem (or one of them) is that there is no better philosophical discourse available to him: as Roger Luckhurst remarks, “Jekyll, sensing the flicker of an alternative multiplicity but having no means to name it, can only resort to moralistic and materialistic binaries, collapsing back into an account that divides the pathological doctor and his savage self.”32 Deflected from the radical insights of multifariousness and simultaneity, Jekyll returns to conventional and more comforting choices between two fixed knowns: saint or sinner, self or other, “an angel instead of a fiend” (59). But it is too late: having roared out of his cage, Hyde cannot be put back. Hyde is a troublingly liminal figure, the physically manifested proof that a radical new understanding of reality must be accepted. This material identity that returns after Jekyll’s severe physical and existential trial is, in effect, a weird horror, monstrous and amoral and unknown; he is an embodiment of the kind of world Villiers uncovers in The Great God Pan, a ripple across the threshold of “a world before which the human soul seemed to shrink back and shudder.”33 Jekyll separates spirit from body and exposes himself to occupation by a “foul soul” whom Utterson and Enfield are unable to describe, but who produces in Utterson a “hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear” (16). As an expression of something these Victorian gentlemen may not want to acknowledge about themselves, Hyde, through their eyes, lets us “see the inside from the perspective of the outside.”34 None of the other characters, including Jekyll, can fully admit or describe Hyde. They comprehend him partially, obliquely, uncomfortably, in horror. As Martin Tropp observes, Jekyll and Hyde “is about Utterson’s

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and Lanyon’s incomprehension as much as it is about Jekyll’s new understanding. […] Both a detective case and a case in abnormal psychology, it constantly escapes pinning down by the lawyer’s methodical logic”35 ; for Garrett, similarly, “the power of naming” fails, and Hyde remains “faceless […] a blank to be filled in by each interpreter.”36 Despite Utterson’s efforts to explain him as “troglodytic” or as “Satan’s signature” Hyde remains inexplicable and indescribable (16). Enfield “can see him at this very moment” yet “can’t describe him,” “couldn’t specify the point,” “really can name nothing out of the way” (10). The language does not exist, it seems, to articulate Hyde or what he means; Stiles argues that the novel “lays bare the limitations of scientific prose.”37 The other characters experience Hyde empirically at the level of individual impression and emotional response, but he eludes the systemic mastery of language, and remains troubling. The mismatch between the weird outcome of Jekyll’s hybrid chemicaloccult experiment (Hyde’s existence) and the capacity of scientific discourse to articulate it is clear. Jekyll does try, though. Late on, to his tortured imagination, Hyde appears as not only hellish, but inorganic. This was the shocking thing: that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, would usurp the offices of life. (69)

Jekyll’s effort to express such extremities of horror presents a Hyde who is monstrous in the way of weird monsters, assimilable neither to conventional mythological traditions nor to any available moral frameworks. Despite the moral language of “sin” and “hell,” Jekyll has by now given up on the false comfort of stable binaries. What form the sin and gestures of the “amorphous dust” take can hardly be pictured; these are only the best words available to Jekyll to signal its awfulness. This horror is “inorganic” yet slimy, dead with no shape, yet taking on a form and function like life. The monstrousness of Hyde cannot be reduced to such comprehensible dualities like other weird monsters, as Kelly Hurley demonstrates of fin-de-siècle fiction in The Gothic Body and Graham Harman shows of Lovecraft’s weird tales, he exists in gaps and occlusions—conceptually, psychically, physically, and linguistically.38 However, clearly Hyde is no

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outer monstrosity. Of twenty-first-century weird fiction, Timothy Jarvis finds themes and tropes no longer orientated outward, or only outward, at a cosmos indifferent or hostile to humanity, but also inward at the crossings of borders forced upon us by our changing bodies, by the revelation of the world-without-us.39

An inward orientation of the weird like this also marks Jekyll and Hyde as a weird tale. Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde dissolves all internal boundaries that might have been thought to exist around Jekyll’s physical and intellectual identity. Originating within Jekyll, Hyde feels “natural” to the doctor, even to the extent of being more of a self than the original. “In my eyes,” Jekyll reports, the new form “bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single” than he did (58). At first, in Jekyll’s unreliable testimony, at least, Hyde appears as something progressive, a purer (which is not to say gooder) self in comparison with the contaminated doctor. Yet Jekyll did initially hope to produce a better version of the self, which finds a corollary in spiritualist speculations on the possibilities for spiritual development. W. T. Stead, in “The Man of Dreams” (1895), offers the remarkably optimistic spin that while people may be brewing a Hyde, “under the outward semblance and mask of an unregenerate reprobate, the suppressed other self may be building up, little by little, the higher and purer nature, which will only be seen in its reality when the mortal scaffolding of the flesh falls into the tomb.”40 Myers, in “Multiplex Personality,” also argued that identity is “capable of being reconstituted after an improved pattern” and that “spontaneous readjustments of man’s being are not all of them pathological or retrogressive.”41 Although these aspirations are undermined rather than fulfilled by the actual results of his experiment, what Jekyll has produced may look horrifyingly forward to future unthinkable possibilities for the human self as much as back to its perceived savage, primitive biological past. Jekyll’s discovery reveals previously unthought of possibilities and hints at unknown wonders beyond the limits of the physical world as currently understood. These revelations, too, must be acknowledged as components of the narrative if Hyde’s origin, actions and extant corpse are accepted as such. Hyde’s depravity, crimes, and the horror of Jekyll’s gradual disintegration may ultimately dominate in most readings of the novella, but Jekyll’s

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discovery has nonetheless revised what must be accepted as reality in this storyworld. This revision is more or less in line with emerging contemporary psychological theories of the self and consciousness, and yet exceeds them by invoking occult language of dimensions beyond the visible everyday world. It presents a weird, reconfigured version of reality and ways of knowing, while revealing that behind the everyday is something horrific and soul-threatening, unknowable, shapeless, beyond current grasp or ken. Jekyll and Hyde’s engagement with contemporary debates and developments in psychology establishes a weird ontology or conception of reality—one which secures the novella’s place in the weird tradition as well as helping to account for its recognised influence on later writers. Ontologically and narratologically, Jekyll and Hyde is an unstable, ungraspable, irreducible text, never fully knowable, resisting the fixing of meaning and existing on the brink of the weird. Through its multiplicity, the novella’s rich and varied contributions to literary and popular culture exist not only at the level of its tropes and plot premise, but also at the level of the story’s underlying worldview. That includes its contributions to the emergence of the weird tale, as this and the next chapter will show through stories by Machen and Nesbit. Jekyll’s experiment exposes a new and perhaps unwelcome aspect to reality—and he also deploys an unorthodox mixture of knowledge and methods in order to prove it. The “stamping efficacy” (58) shaping the amorphous, indescribable, and “hitherto unknown” (16) horror that is Hyde rests on an enweirded epistemology that rewrites the relative contributions of body and spirit to the nature of the self and the nature of reality. I return to the epistemological dimensions of Jekyll’s experiment and its outcomes in Chapter 3, but for now I continue exploring ideas about weird borderlands—this time through the writing of Arthur Machen.

Enchanted Student: Arthur Machen’s Borderlands In Far Off Things (1922), Machen describes his young self as “an enchanted student of the daylight country, which […] for me never was illuminated by common daylight, but rather by suns that rose from the holy seas of faery and sank down behind magic hills.”42 As a writer still best known for chilling weird tales like The Great God Pan and “The White People” (1899), Machen’s visionary emphasis on magical illumination and holy enchantment may seem out of kilter with the

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unspeakable horror confronted by so many of his 1890s characters, for whom the strange wonder of the world often manifests as miraculousness gone wrong. Dreadfulness was only one expression of the vision of a writer whose formative years in Gwent in Wales impressed on him the ways in which “[e]verything visible was the veil of an invisible secret.”43 Machen was a lifelong Anglo-Catholic, yet, like Algernon Blackwood, was drawn to the occult (and to writing) in search of the kind of visionary revelation and mystical experience the regular church couldn’t provide.44 Machen’s interest in occult texts and ideas dates to at least 1885 and his employment by publisher George Redway, and he became a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1899 after the death of his first wife and on the encouragement of his friend A. E. Waite.45 His writings are seen as a set of elaborations on a single project; Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson observe that “[p]ractically his entire writing career was devoted to expressing a spiritual philosophy: that the world and everything in it is a good deal stranger and more miraculous than we know.”46 This is visible across his work—in weird tales like The Three Impostors (1895) and “The Terror” (1917), autobiographical fiction like The Hill of Dreams (1907), and non-fiction like Hieroglyphics (1902). S. T. Joshi considers Impostors to be “Machen’s most sustained weird work” and it and The Great God Pan are also significant for the weird tale as successors to Jekyll and Hyde and the Stevensons’ co-authored The Dynamiter (1885).47 They were received as such by contemporary readers, and a direct line can be traced from Jekyll and Hyde through The Great God Pan to Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” (1929), which refers to Machen’s tale.48 Machen’s weird tales are sure that a wondrous reality lies beyond the everyday, but the capacity of the modern world’s state of knowledge to understand it is severely limited, especially by its narrow materialism. Machen’s mystic, anti-science worldview is well known, articulated in his own work as well as through those of his critics and biographers.49 According to James Machin, although Machen was “willing to press contemporary scientific (and pseudoscientific) ideas to his own ends” in fiction, his interest in it was “superficial and rebarbative.”50 He certainly had strong feelings about it, especially its modern, materialist iterations. “If I were writing in the Middle Ages,” he remarked in a letter to his publisher,

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I should need no scientific basis […] In these days the supernatural per se is entirely incredible; to believe, we must link our wonders to some scientific or pseudo-scientific fact, or basis, or method. Thus we do not believe in “ghosts” but in telepathy, not in “witchcraft” but in hypnotism. If Mr Stevenson had written his great masterpiece about 1590-1650, Dr Jekyll would have made a compact with the devil. In 1886 Dr Jekyll sends to the Bond Street chemists for some rare drugs.51

Here and elsewhere, Machen suggests that changes in attitudes to wonder have been a matter not of essence but of construction or labelling, which links Jekyll and Hyde to a literary tradition as well as to its contemporary context. Wonders remain wonders, however they are constructed, while old forms of knowledge may be better at recognising truths about the world than the modern late nineteenth-century variety.52 For Machen, however, the nature of wonder is not inherently a force for good but occupies, as Vincent Starrett describes it, “a strange borderland, lying somewhere between Dreams and Death”; Machen’s readers “see only dimly the phantasmagoria beyond [the veil]; the ecstasies of vague shapes with a shining about them, on the one hand; on the other the writhings of animate gargoyles.”53 Thus the secrets uncovered by characters in Machen’s stories are never clearly represented, but like Hyde, they are only half-known, lingering on the cusp of the weird: what, exactly, makes the opal of “The Inmost Light” shine both beautifully and horribly, or, in The Great God Pan, lights up Mary’s face a moment before she succumbs to madness? The fates of scientific figures and their human subjects in The Great God Pan, “The Inmost Light,” and The Three Impostors imply that modern science involves severe moral, physical, and spiritual risk. Wonder can be horrifying as well as uplifting, and much depends on how it is approached. Those “who understand nothing but materialism” are “very bad people” according to Machen, in Hieroglyphics.54 In Impostors , Machen’s fictional critique of positivist materialism is reflected as much in structure as content. Its nested, obliquely related sequence of stories— as the eponymous “three impostors” tell a series of tall tales to Dyson and Phillips, the two idle investigators of the mystery of the Young Man in Spectacles—makes for an uncertain narrative world. Within the stories, individual episodes such as “The Novel of the Black Seal” and “The Novel of the White Powder” involve characters delving into hidden or unknown occult knowledge and the unstable relationships between body

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and spirit. Like Jekyll and Hyde, Machen’s novel constructs a weird narrative reality that is only partially knowable and resists fixing to a single state or meaning. In The London Adventure (1924), Machen recommended a different method of knowing: “I try to reverence the signs, omens, messages that are delivered in queer ways and queer place, not in the least according to the plans laid down either by the theologians or the men of science.”55 As the narrator of the short story “A Fragment of Life” (1904) puts it Our stupid ancestors taught us that we could become wise by studying books as “science,” by meddling with test-tubes, geological specimens, microscopic preparations and the like; but they who have cast off these follies know that they must not read “science” books but mass-books, and that the soul is made wise by the contemplation of mystic ceremonies and elaborate and curious rites.56

The path of science, then, is a path of folly, of meddling with false wisdom at the expense of true understanding. Through the use of inverted commas, even the pairing of “books” and “science” appears to be distasteful. Even more seriously, accepting a modern, materialist standpoint on knowledge is dangerous—it could make the difference between achieving an ecstatic spiritual experience or a dreadful one. Critics have noted ways in which practices of reading and writing were central to Machen’s search for the ecstatic experience through a “fusion of research, belief, and creative art.”57 Reading popular fiction, assisted by its democratic level of shared accessibility, could be a route towards “the possibility of sheer spiritual bliss and occult citizenship”58 ; in Hieroglyphics, Machen identifies “Ecstasy” as the defining quality of “fine literature”: Substitute, if you like, rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown. All and each will convey what I mean […] but in every case there will be that withdrawal from the common life and the common consciousness which justifies my choice of “ecstasy” as the best symbol of my meaning.59

Through writing, Machen “intertwines the spiritual experience with artistic pursuit, defining art as a gateway, if an inadequate one, to the numinous.”60 The corruption of art, Zoë Lehmann Imfeld argues, such as in the elaborate artifice of the invented tales of the three impostors and their ritual treatment of the young man in spectacles, can tip everything over

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into horror. Machen’s weird tales “show the numinous to run a troubled path” between ecstasy and evil.61 “The White People” walks that line, functioning as “an exploration of knowledge as grace, and of knowledge corrupted.”62 It is the story, told through her own diary, of a sixteen-year-old girl introduced to pagan magic by her nurse, and who learns the rituals enabling her to encounter the “white people” at a secret place in the woods, ultimately leading to her self-destruction. Ambrose, the scholarly recluse into whose possession the diary has passed, argues that the girl’s story is emblematic of true sin, which has nothing to do with the intentions or innocence but rather with transgression against the known order. Kimberley Jackson argues that “The White People” constructs “the world of true sin” as “a world of transgression and transcendence always present beneath the known and the civilized”63 ; in this sense, the numinous, perhaps, does not so much tread a line between two states as encompass a broader sublime experience. Sin, as Ambrose claims, is “simply the attempt to penetrate into another and a higher sphere in a forbidden manner […] sin is an effort to gain the ecstasy.”64 Since both ecstasy and sin arise out of the same natural urge towards mystic experience, the distinction between them is fine or almost non-existent; as Machen later remarked in Far Off Things , man “is by his nature designed to look upwards […] to discern the eternal in things temporal.”65 “A Fragment of Life” (1904) explores the same impulse more positively, in an effort “to imbue London life with a condition of visionary strangeness that would inspire rather than alienate.”66 It is one of several tales in which London’s urban spaces become uncertain and unreal (as happens at moments in “The Red Hand” and Impostors , for example).67 “Fragment” tracks the escape of a young couple, Edward and Mary Darnell, from their mundane mid-income domesticity through the teachings of the ancient Celtic church. Mr. Darnell realises that “the whole world is but a great ceremony or sacrament, which teaches under visible forms a hidden and transcendent doctrine. […] he found in the ritual of the church a perfect image of the world; an image purged, exalted, and illuminate.”68 Darnell and his wife gradually acquire the kind of knowledge required to gain this transcendental borderland, discarding the “follies” of scientific knowledge.69 Even so, there are “darker perils” in these exalted teachings too—“suggestions of an awful region into which the soul might enter […] of evocations which could summon the utmost forces of evil from their dark places,” while childhood memories carry

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“a note of warning, as a symbol of dangers that might be in the way.”70 Here ends Mr. Darnell’s own third-person narration, and the ultimate fate of the Darnells is left ambiguous as the narrative declares it “impossible to carry on [their] history” any further.71 The exact nature of the state of transcendence they have reached is no longer the business of this story of a fragment of life. Such transcendence, it seems, is an absent presence, a gap beyond the current state of knowledge that, for exactly that reason, cannot be filled. This is the space of the weird. Lehmann Imfeld argues that in The Great God Pan, for example, Helen Vaughan is not so much an evil presence as “an absence of something,” locating her outside a Christian humanist teleology and problematising attempts to characterise her straightforwardly as a devil figure.72 Since this absence is nihilistic, presenting it as horrifying reinforces Christian humanism: “The humanity which can only be realised through grace haunts the empty and negative spaces which provide the very horror to these tales.”73 These traits—absence of supernatural teleology, negative spaces, fine line between ecstasy and evil—mark Machen’s tale as weird, while as an unspeakable absence, a “nothing present when there should be something,” Helen Vaughan also resonates with Fisher’s conception of the eerie.74 Fisher’s examples are questions about built monuments like Stonehenge, but we could ask similar questions about Helen: “What kind of symbolic order did these beings belong to?” and “Is there a deliberative agent here at all?”75 Answers are not entirely forthcoming, though as Villiers reminds Austin, “those who are wise know what all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing” (92). But their system of meaning has been lost (which, Helen’s career shows, is just as well for human sanity). We never hear Helen’s version of her story, or discover much about what kind of agency of her own she possesses. The failures of presence in Pan, the absences and negations, are abcanny traits, unknowable and unrelatable to human teleology; as a weird monster, as the next section of this chapter explores, Helen is an example of the “unrepresentable and unknowable, the evasive of meaning.”76 Her existence is, however, tied to a history of sorts, to what Joshi describes as the “Little People mythology.”77 In several of Machen’s tales, including Impostors , “The Red Hand” (1895) and “The Shining Pyramid” (1895), a lost pagan Celtic world lingers alongside modern civilisation. Often located in remote regions of Wales (where the child Helen meets strange playmates), it occasionally surfaces in London, through objects like the black seal, symbols like the Red Hand, and people such

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as Jervase Craddock (in Impostors ’ “The Novel of the Black Seal”). In “The Shining Pyramid,” a missing girl and a series of objects and symbols lead Dyson and Vaughan (no relation) to witness the “Pyramid of fire,” in which they glimpse a loathsome gathering of “things made in the form of men but stunted like children hideously deformed” and hear a sibliant language.78 Machen’s Little People mythology constructs an enweirded history, an impossible history that, if it were to be true, explodes the consensus reality of what history is (or was) and demands acceptance of an alternative or co-existing, even conflicting, history existing in parallel. Aaron Worth argues that the term “little people” is not intended to suggest that a fairy superstition is real, but rather is an expression of something more profound, the “predatory, nocturnal horrors who form the kernel of truth behind folk traditions of fairies or ‘little people’.”79 Worth argues that Machen’s little people exist both within and outside history. They are unwelcome prehistoric irruptions, but their possession and creation of artefacts and their capacity to use symbolic language “signals their participation in the cultural stage of civilization, placing them in the domain of history proper.”80 The arts, not the capacity for reason, were what “distinguished [humans] from other animals,” Machen concluded in Far Off Things, and “we may say that all artists are in reality survivals from an earlier time”81 ; the little people’s capacity to create locates their history that much closer to that of human beings. The idea of a weird alternative past lying behind the everyday is captured by some of Kimberly Jackson’s remarks on abhistory: The ab-historical past that Machen invokes is that which cannot be claimed by the present or by history because it remains always past, a past with no future, or a past with no present. It is in this past where true savagery resides; and because it lies, unclaimed, alongside human history, it is capable of intruding into the human world, the world in which man has come to define himself as the most imposing figure. In Machen’s tales, what has never been human cannot claim man’s shape, and yet it is precisely from out of a human face that it peers. Contained within the human form itself is the very real existence of the possibility of never-having-been, or the possibility of another rationality and another physique.82

In this account, abhistories, like the weird, hover between true reality and unthinkable alternative, hinting of possibilities neither fully present nor entirely erasable. Jackson identifies Machen’s tales as “supernatural”

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rather than weird, and doesn’t connect abhistory with either Miéville’s abcanny or Kelly Hurley’s and William Hope Hodgson’s abhuman.83 Nonetheless, making the link (particularly since Jackson cites Hurley’s The Gothic Body) is irresistible: the “ab-historical past” described here is evidently a weird past. As Miéville puts it, the weird is “suffused with abness,” producing an “invented cultural memory” and “backproject[ing]” a “radical unremembered alterity into history.”84 Machen’s abhistory is a numinous history, lying alongside the dominant modern British construction of the past and occasionally brushing wondrously, horribly against it. The history of science, too, becomes abhistorical in Machen’s hands. Worth deftly distinguishes Pan from science fiction by suggesting that the story is premised on an “‘antiquum’, a recovered piece of older, occult knowledge” as a counterpoint to the “novum” posited by Darko Suvin as the marker of sf.85 Tales like Pan and “The Inmost Light,” Worth argues, imply “that such modern disciplines [as neuroscience] are only catching up with the ‘sciences’ of a bygone age.”86 The knowledge likely to be mishandled by modern science is not new, but has always been there, lying behind the mainstream history of science and out of view to most people. The existence of Machen’s Little People and the secret knowledge they represent expose the delusions of anthropocentricity: its definitions of the world and its history, the limits of its knowledge and ways of knowing. The normal reality that has been constructed by histories and language, scientific rationality, and visible material forms (such as bodies and objects) is undermined. The dangers of unwise picking and prodding at the relationships between these is one of the subjects of The Great God Pan, discussed next. As far as his early weird tales go, at least, Machen’s worldview consists in a sometimes-known but only partly knowable true reality, which must be approached with caution. The weird borderland in Machen’s fiction is a numinous more-than-visible world of evil and terror, or awe and ecstasy, or all of these, always there but mostly out of reach of human knowing. An understanding that the world is not limited to materiality is essential for a meaningful existence—if it is the right sort of understanding. In Machen’s weird tales, scientists and experimental techniques often unleash the most destructive and unknowable terrors, in fictional attacks on materialist ontology as well as on the practices and epistemology of nineteenth-century positivist science.

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Symbols of Something and Nothing: The Great God Pan The Great God Pan first appeared in 1890 and was published in book form along with “The Inmost Light” (of which more in the next chapter) in 1894. They share several parallels in plot and premise; in each case, an occult neurological operation opens a path to shadowy realms beyond the known world. The Great God Pan opens with an experiment conducted by Dr. Raymond on his ward Mary, in which an incision in her brain enables her to “see the God Pan.”87 This encounter, “a metaphor for the experience of ecstasy,” turns appalling and leads to her loss of sanity and to her pregnancy.88 Their occult offspring grows into a woman usually known as Helen Vaughan, who draws the attention of Villiers and others after a series of London gentlemen are found dead, apparently of fright; she is eventually tracked down and forced to end her own life. Like Jekyll and Hyde, The Great God Pan is to an extent presented as a mystery uncovered by a third party, supplemented with documents and additional accounts from other characters. Through its piecemeal construction as well as through its content, the narrative resists absolute knowing. In the narrative’s gaps and elisions, in the suicides, insanities and deaths, and in documents discovered by Villiers and collected by Clarke, hints lurk of the terrible unknown world, beings, and history behind everyday reality. “It is an old story,” says Villiers to Austin, an old mystery played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens. […] Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish tale. (92–3)

Villiers’s efforts to articulate his sense of the numinous are marked by eerie failures of presence—language can’t bring these mysteries into existence, which is just as well because their failure of absence would be overwhelmingly terrifying; as it is, weird forces are both there and not there. The documents included in the narrative are often fragmentary or stop short of full representation (such as Dr. Matheson’s account, discussed later).

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Again like Jekyll and Hyde, The Great God Pan uses a scientific experiment on a human subject to demonstrate radical theories that, if correct, would entail accepting a revised version of the nature of reality—one that consists in much more than what is visible. Dr. Raymond explains that “I devoted myself to transcendental medicine” (2)—a new inter-discipline to complement Jekyll’s “mystic” and “transcendental” chemistry. He positions himself as an explorer, the discoverer of a world of knowledge: “[…] the great truth burst upon me, and I saw, mapped out in lines of sight, a whole world, a sphere unknown; continents and islands, and great oceans” (5). A combination of research and insight leads him to new truths about reality and to understand, he thinks, the nature of the border separating one world from another. As he explains to Clarke, the friend he has invited to witness his experiment, the “real” world is not ours but the other one, the one that exists “beyond this glamour and this vision […] beyond them all as beyond a veil” (3). To access this world, Dr. Raymond will demonstrate the physiological manipulation of spiritual consciousness by means of “a slight lesion in the grey matter […]; a trifling rearrangement of certain cells” (4). He proposes a physical, neurological basis for the activities of the mind and spirit, resembling the suggestions put forward by the SPR of receptive nerves accounting for telepathy.89 Raymond applies, in short, materialist, positivist approaches to an occult experiment in “transcendental medicine”; the incompatibility of the two is partly what causes the terrible events that follow. Jack Poller argues that Machen drew primarily on alchemical rather than modern occult ideas, given his ambivalence to materialist science and scepticism of the SPR’s adoption of positivist methods.90 For Machen, materialist science, including in an occult pseudo-scientific form, could never prove a successful route to ecstatic experience, and indeed, might lead to far worse. As Ambrose remarks in “The White People,” “we are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognise real wickedness if we encountered it.”91 Dr. Raymond is therefore set up for failure despite (or because of) his sincere conviction of achieving success. Over those “certain cells,” Dr. Raymond claims complete knowledge and precise control: “I am perfectly instructed,” he informs Clarke, “as to the possible functions of those nerve centres in the scheme of things. With a touch I can bring them into play, with a touch, I say, I can set free the current” (7). The “nerve centres” in question belong to the girl Mary, who is about to undergo a drugged but not anaesthetised brain operation. In the public imagination,

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Anne Stiles outlines, neurologists were popularly conceived as villains “due to their controversial research methods (especially vivisection) and the obvious ways in which their research undermined the widespread lay perception of the ‘soul’ or the ‘will’ as the governing force behind human action.”92 Dr. Raymond’s psychophysiological leanings and cold attitude to his experimental subject positions him among such villains; he is an exemplary cool, detached experimental scientist, practicing, as Natasha Rebry puts it, a “soulless science.”93 Jeffrey Renye points out that Raymond’s urge to “tear the folds that separate modes of perception” is irresponsible in that the experiment serves no obvious useful purpose.94 Raymond pushes moral boundaries further than his real-life colleagues. Late-Victorian neurologists “could conceive of no physical locus for spirituality in the human brain”95 : this is exactly what Raymond does conceive and locate. But rather than his experiment providing potentially welcome scientific evidence for some kind of spirituality, it overwhelmingly backfires in a profoundly destructive way. Raymond’s beliefs and methods prove inadequate for dealing with occult realities. Despite Raymond’s confidence in his skill, there are hints of doubts when he speaks of the “spirit”; he tells Clarke that “probably, for the first time since man was made, a spirit will gaze on a spirit world” (7). The comma after “probably” indicates it is the outcome that is uncertain, not the method (of which Raymond is entirely confident). Nor does he really know what that other world is. He ends his claim for perfect control over the “nerve centres” by saying: “with a touch I can complete the communication between this world of sense and – we shall be able to finish that sentence later on” (7). Yet he never really does. The failure to complete this sentence suggests that mysteries endure beyond the limits of knowledge, and indicates the lack of adequate language to describe the world beyond. Only metaphors are available: currents, veils, “seeing the god Pan” (3). Ordinary people, though, are evidently not equipped to cope with whatever occupies the inarticulable gap beyond this world of sense, and Mary loses her sanity. Dr. Raymond is “still quite cool” as he brings Clarke to see her: “it is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan” (15). He regrets his broken instrument, but his main concern is that he has proved his point; only years later does Raymond acknowledge that although “[w]hat I said Mary would see, she saw,” he “forgot that no human eyes can

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look on such a sight with impunity” (108). Raymond, then, makes several erroneous assumptions due to his positivist cast: that the knowledge set to be gained will be gained by himself, and will be beneficial to him; that he, the scientist, is in control of the situation; that the condition of the body determines the state of spirit or consciousness; and that Mary herself is no more than an operational instrument. The ultimate result of the experiment, though, is Helen Vaughan, the spirit of Pan made flesh from Mary’s body. Helen can be seen as both an invoked demon and a distortion of the spirit forms channelled by mediums and clothed with their bodily matter; as a weird being she is both of these and more. With Mary unable to communicate her experience, Helen is the only worldly evidence for what “seeing the God Pan” is all about—and she, like Hyde, is at root an unknowable being who defies ultimate comprehension. Reports of the childhood of Mary’s daughter filter into the narrative through the memoirs of Clarke, telling of her corruption of two playmates (a young boy who loses his reason and a girl who later dies). As an adult, she comes to the attention of Villiers after a series of London gentlemen are found dead. The beautiful Helen, it seems, seduces her victims and reveals to them certain horrific unnameable evils that drive them to suicide. Helen has been read as a degenerate and transgressive figure, linked to fin-de-siècle decadence, social anxiety over women’s sexuality, and inherited madness.96 The insanity of Mary signals her intellectual inferiority (the power of her will cannot maintain her psychological unity in the face of her experiences), and she passes on her degenerate traits to Helen. But Helen does not have to be understood as degenerate. Machin, for one, disputes aspects of reading “Machen as a deeply engaged cogitator and interpreter of contemporary scientific discourse and accompanying neuroses surrounding evolution and degeneration” and calls for a greater range of responses to his weird fiction.97 Like Hyde, Helen is legible in more ways than only as a degenerate horror. If Raymond represents, as he claims, a peculiarly advanced state of human scientific understanding, then Helen is a being well beyond that understanding. As a union of human with one of “the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things” (93), she is also a progressive creature: something new. She may derive from an abhistorical past and ancient knowledge, but those are revived through the modern scientific methods were used to create her, and, unlike the “little people” encountered on rural fringes in “The Shining Pyramid” and The Three Impostors ’ “Novel of the Black Seal,”

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she is a being capable of living as a modern woman in London society. Humans like Mary, Helen’s childhood friends, and her adult lovers have not the strength of mind, body or will to assimilate the knowledge that she embodies and conveys. The world is not ready for Helen Vaughan, as she too seems to acknowledge by her final, if coerced, decision to end her life. Her suicide is reported in the narrative’s final chapter, “The Fragments,” in an account I’ll examine in detail. Helen’s death is reported by a Dr. Matheson, summoned by Villiers for the sole purpose of bearing witness to the event. Although he doubts whether “science would benefit by these brief notes if they could be published,” he nevertheless presents them scientifically (98). As a professional, the doctor takes his duties seriously: As was befitting, I did all that my knowledge suggested to make sure that I was suffering under no delusion. At first astounded, I could hardly think, but in a minute’s time I was sure that my pulse was steady and regular, and that I was in my real and true senses. I then fixed my eyes quietly on what was before me. (99)

Dr. Matheson appeals to the reliability of his senses and the supremacy of his mind; though briefly thrown in astonishment, he soon gets his body under control and calmly observes what is happening. His report is thus to be received as an empirical account conveyed by his “real and true senses” and is rationally presented. The scientific gaze is needed to confront the weird—at the same time as its power is shattered by that confrontation. What Dr. Matheson witnesses is far from rational and instead violates many assumptions about the stability of the world. He watches Helen’s body undergo a series of changes, in a much-quoted passage describing how the firm structure of the human body that I had thought to be unchangeable, and permanent as adamant, began to melt and dissolve. […] I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to the depths, even to the abyss of all being. (99–100)

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Critics often focus here on Helen’s horrible bodily instability and how it reflects anxieties over sexual transgression or evolutionary degeneration. Certainly, her transformations, like Jekyll’s efforts to describe his experience of Hyde, plausibly reflect “a flickering backward-run down the evolutionary tree towards protoplasm.”98 They flout several supposedly safe distinctions: female and male, human and beast, body and world, and Darryl Jones points out that “these interstices […] in their violation of seemingly clear category distinctions, are the sites of revulsion and therefore of horror.”99 These interstices are also sites of weird, whose affect is not horror alone but comprises awe and wonder too. The above quoted passage needs to be understood in the context of the whole scene. The scene’s weirdness shows more fully when the entirety of Dr. Matheson’s report is taken into account, especially the contrast between its confident beginning and its troubled, fragmentary end. Watching Helen’s bodily changes, Dr. Matheson acknowledges that “horror and revolting nausea rose up within me, and an odour of corruption choked my breath,” but assures his implied reader that he “remained firm” (99). Such scientific resolution in the face of revulsion is necessary to bring him to the brink of the weird and enable him to observe the world around him turning distinctly Lovecraftian: The light within the room had turned to blackness, not the darkness of night, in which objects are seen dimly, for I could see clearly and without difficulty. But it was the negation of light; objects were presented to my eyes, if I may say so, without any medium, in such a manner that if there had been a prism in the room I should have seen no colours represented in it. (100)

Observing the remainder of the scene appears to require a whole new kind of seeing, one for which there is no known word. The limits of Dr. Matheson’s senses to perceive in this alternative way—he can see clearly but only partially—as well as the limits of language, are discernible here in his struggle to articulate it; this weird experience resists the scientific grid of intelligibility. His endeavours can only describe the unknown with reference to the known, in language of analogy, negation, and inversions. Helen, though, belongs to some entirely other reality and other way of thinking and being. Her most horrifying form, too, is beyond meaningful description. First, she reduces to “nothing but a substance as jelly”

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(100), identifiable as alchemical “first matter.”100 This substance is significant not least because from it Helen develops once last time; she is an alchemical being “conceived from the tenebrae activae and in contact with it, who then, to the dismay and terror of her earth-bound witnesses, ascends.”101 Dr. Matheson records the process with difficulty: “the ladder was ascended again … [here the MS. is illegible] … for one instant I saw a Form, shaped in dimness before me, which I will not farther describe” (100–101). The elision in the middle of this quotation is in Machen’s text: within it, Helen’s most advanced position is attained in a form so indescribable that not only does Dr. Matheson now shirk his declared duty but even ink on paper revolts. Her least knowable, most unspeakable, and most horrifying shape is not, after all, the jelly-like matter at which the ladder begins, but her most developed (and ancient) state at its top. In Helen’s death throes, progression and decline, ancient and new, past and future, awe and horror, collapse into one. Dr. Matheson’s inadequate report is a final indictment by Machen of the failure of science to explain the real meaning of existence, illustrating his later remarks in Far Off Things that the “‘truth’ of science […] is a figment of the brain, a nonexistent monster, like dragons, griffins, and basilisks.”102 Scientific truth, as in Dr. Matheson’s account, is meant to be pinned down by accurate empirical observation, conveyed through the symbolic order of written or spoken language, which here fails. His problems with describing and representing Helen, however, are not his alone, but pervade the narrative (and echo the irreducibility of Hyde). Austin, for example, earlier remarks on Helen’s “strange” expression; there is “something about her face which I didn’t like” and feels familiar, but which he can’t identify except as “that odd feeling one sometimes has in a dream” (76). Austin’s and Dr. Matheson’s language is consistent with the discourse around mystic experience, which contributes to the story’s weird affect. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), psychologist William James noted that mystic experience is characterised by “Ineffability,” which he defined as a “negative” state. Of it, the subject “immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”103 The difficulty the other characters have in imparting how they experience Helen echoes Machen’s own reflections on his literary efforts to “recreate those vague impressions of wonder and awe and mystery that I myself had received from the form

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and shape of the land of my boyhood and youth”; these he saw as impossible “in a story of material incidents” but perhaps possible in “an interior tale of the soul and its emotions.”104 Both Mary and the boy Trevor met by Helen as a child are profoundly psychologically affected and have no means of attempting to impart their knowledge, which is instead retained and silenced by men. Helen’s childhood playmate Rachel has her “wild story” cut off unsaid by Clarke closing the book of his memoirs (26), while in her adult life, Herbert “would not dare whisper” what Helen told him (34), and a written account of her “entertainment” is so terrible Austin cannot read it (92). Natasha Rebry understands these stallings as an inability to cognitively process the shock, and thus as further evidence for the story’s relationship with contemporary debates over the physiological basis of the mind and for Machen’s opposition to biological reductionism.105 However, part of these ineffable encounters between humans and the god Pan is a corrupted form of ecstasy. In this sense, Pan and Helen stand not for the transcendental mystery of A Fragment of Life, but rather for the transgressive knowledge of The White People. Dr. Matheson’s account presents his witnessing of Helen’s death as enweirded and twisted, made terrible and horrifying. Although his account is partial and his experience is indirect, it is the fullest articulation the narrative contains of the distorted, corrupted mystic experience that “seeing the god Pan” might offer. Machen himself seems later to have considered the effects of The Great God Pan as something of a mistake, reflecting on “my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams in fire and works in clay.”106 Hence, perhaps, the ambiguous affect of this weird tale, hovering between wonder and horror. A different understanding of the nature of reality and a different understanding of knowledge—of the relationship between body, mind, and spirit—is demanded by The Great God Pan, in an illustration of Machen’s own opposition to a materialist, mechanistic ontology in favour of the wonder and horror of a more enchanted world. An eerie, abhistorical figure, Helen exists outwith conventional moral, philosophical, and semiotic frameworks that might otherwise explain her. Hers is an advanced state beyond human comprehension that can barely be witnessed, let alone narrated, understood, or controlled by conventional scientific eyes. She violates the stable boundaries that are supposed to structure the world and its history for us, and, like Hyde, eludes the empirical knowing represented by direct description.

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Yet if Helen can’t be held in place by a scientific grid of intelligibility, it is only fair to reflect that she can’t be pinned down by a literary critical one either. Like Jekyll and Hyde, Pan offers a multivalent, polysemic plurality at the levels of plot, character, narration, and meaning which ensures its lingering influence in later weird fiction and the fascination of current criticism. For Machen “the whole matter of imaginative literature depends upon this faculty of seeing the universe from the aeonian pebble of the wayside to the raw suburban street as something new, unheard of, marvellous, finally, miraculous,” and readers also must acquire that new way of seeing the world, accepting the co-existence of ecstasy and horror in the miraculous numinous of Machen’s weird tales.107

Conclusion Jekyll and Hyde helped to pioneer the weird tale by exploiting certain fractures and debates in contemporary science; it found the weird already present within the innovations of 1880s efforts to rethink psychology, and thus already part of the fin-de-siècle world in which the novella is rooted. The multiplicity and indeterminacy of reality and consciousness and their implications for relationship between body and mind are all explored in Stevenson’s novella, as is the almost blasphemous alarm, horror, and perturbation experienced during the encounter with the unknown and unknowable (Hyde) which characterises the weird tale. In Machen’s weird tales, too, pure materialism is challenged as the defining relation of body to spirit becomes fluid and uncertain. Hyde and Helen Vaughan figure as amorphous monstrous shapeless things, unknown weird beings of shapes and textures that don’t belong in the known natural order of physical existence. Ideas of the multiplicity of human consciousness or soul in Machen’s work take the form of connections with lost, ancient, pagan worlds, abhistories that trouble the dominant narratives about modern civilisation. Machen’s weird tales refuse a single, knowable construction of the world, but insist on other realms, too mysterious and sometimes too evil for human beings to cope with. When a scientific framework of knowledge or investigation is applied to the world beyond the veil, particular trouble ensues—for the characters but also for dominant positivist assumptions about the nature of reality. Machen’s anti-science takes the form of a call for a new, truer kind of knowledge. He objects to science in its particular materialist, positivist

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form, relabelling and reducing old knowledge instead of broadening its modern state. Ways and failures of knowing weird realities is the subject of Chapter 3, but for Machen, the real world beyond the veil exists outwith and regardless of science; Dr. Raymond does not attempt to explain its existence— his concern is how to interact with it. Machen does not need modern science to validate the more-than-visible world. Chapter 3 returns to Jekyll’s experiment to show how the weird reality constructed by the novella depends upon an equally enweirded epistemology: a revised understanding of how this reality can be known (and the limits to knowing it). In different ways, the stories discussed next also interrogate the nature of reality as conventionally understood: from a single stable entity it becomes something expanded or multiple. They also participate in reconfiguring ways of knowing that reality, emphasising the value of direct experience, sensation, and spiritual or emotional feeling alongside the conventional empirics of scientific experiment.

Notes 1. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Donald Lawler, “Reframing Jekyll and Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Strange Case of Gothic Science Fiction,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Anne Stiles, “Jekyll and Hyde as Science Fiction,” in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Caroline McCracken-Flesher (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2013). 2. James Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 14. 3. Ronald R. Thomas, “The Strange Voices in the Strange Case: Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and the Voices of Modern Fiction,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 76. 4. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), 31. 5. Michael Davis, “Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and Late-Victorian Psychology,” Journal of Victorian Culture 11, no. 2 (2006), 2011.

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6. See, for example, Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991); Robert Mighall, “Diagnosing Jekyll: The Scientific Context to Dr Jekyll’s Experiment and Mr Hyde’s Embodiment,” in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror (London: Penguin, 2003); Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Nancy K. Gish, “Jekyll and Hyde: The Psychology of Dissociation,” International Journal of Scottish Literature 2, no. Spring/Summer (2007); Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Martin Danahay, “Dr. Jekyll’s Two Bodies,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35, no. 1 (2013); and Mario Ortiz-Robles, “Liminanimal: The Monster in Late Victorian Fiction,” European Journal of English Studies 19, no. 1 (2015). 7. Davis, “Incongruous Compounds.” 8. Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7. 9. Rylance, Victorian Psychology, 21. 10. Annie Besant, Theosophy (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1912), 14. 11. See Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 247; Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 183–85, for discussions of Myers’ ideas about consciousness. 12. Henri Bergson and F. L. Pogson, trans., Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1910), 231, italics original. 13. David F. Lindenfeld, The Transformation of Positivism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 87. 14. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 203. 15. Peter K. Garrett, “Cries and Voices: Reading Jekyll and Hyde,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 61. 16. Paul Maixner, ed., Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1995); Julia Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). 17. Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 34. 18. Myers, Human Personality, Vol. 1, 15. 19. Reid, Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle, 6; Reid also notes that Stevenson’s letters and notes reveal his long-term interest in

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20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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scientists such as Spencer and Darwin, and he was latterly a member of the Society for Psychical Research from the distance of the South Seas (4). Gish, “Jekyll and Hyde: The Psychology of Dissociation,” 3. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2003), 55. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. Showalter, Sexual Anarchy; Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles. Martin Tropp, Images of Fear: How Horror Stories Helped Shape Modern Culture (1818–1918) (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), 104; William Veeder, “Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Garrett, “Cries and Voices,” 61. On readings of this moment in Jekyll’s “Statement,” see Peter K. Garrett, “Cries and Voices,” and Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 108; Gish, “Jekyll and Hyde: The Psychology of Dissociation,” 3. Garrett, “Cries and Voices,” 63. Linda Dryden, “Robert Louis Stevenson and Popular Culture,” Nordic Journal of English Studies 9, no. 3 (2010). Rylance, Victorian Psychology, 114. Utterson alludes to Hyde’s “evil influence” on Jekyll (31), and identifies the Jekyll-Hyde “connection” as “evil” (43) but only Jekyll uses the word to describe Hyde. Gish, “Jekyll and Hyde: The Psychology of Dissociation,” 6. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Struggle for a Dichotomy: Abjection in Jekyll and His Interpreters,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Luckhurst, Telepathy, 194. Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan,” in The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (London: John Lane, 1894), 66. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 10. Tropp, Images of Fear, 102. See also Smith, Victorian Demons, 39, on Hyde’s resistance of medical interpretation. Garrett, “Cries and Voices,” 65. Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science, 30. Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);

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39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012). Timothy Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-inItself: Fidelity to the ‘Lovecraft Event’ in the Work of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Laird Barron,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017), 1145. W. T. Stead, “The Man of Dreams,” Borderland 2, no. vii (1895), 24. Frederic W. H. Myers, “Multiplex Personality,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research IV (1886), 502, 496. Arthur Machen, Far Off Things (London: Martin Secker, 1922), 11. Machen, Far Off Things, 24–25. See Nick Freeman, “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany,” Literature and Theology 24, no. 3 (2010); Machen, Far Off Things, 27; and Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press [SUNY], 2015). Aidan Reynolds and William E. Charlton, Arthur Machen: A Short Account of His Life and Work (London: Baker, 1963). Mark Valentine, and Roger Dobson, “Introduction,” in Arthur Machen: Artist and Mystic, ed. Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson (Oxford; Northampton: Carmaen Books, 1986), viii; Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). S. T. Joshi, “Introduction,” in The White People and Other Weird Stories (New York: Penguin, 2011), xv; David Trotter, “Introduction,” in The Three Impostors (London: Everyman, 1995), xviii; and Worth, “Introduction,” in The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” in H. P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3: The Haunter of the Dark (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 120. See, for example, Aaron Worth, “Introduction”; Mark Valentine, Arthur Machen (Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan: Seren, 1995); Jessica Webb, “What Lies Beneath: Orthodoxy and the Occult in Victorian Literature” (diss., Cardiff University, 2010); and Machen, Far Off Things. Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 1880–1939, 146. Quoted in Valentine, Arthur Machen, 26. Arthur Machen, The London Adventure (London: Martin Secker, 1924), 21–22. Vincent Starrett, Arthur Machen: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin (Tartarus Press and the Arthur Machen Society, 1996), 11–13. Machen, Hieroglyphics, 34. Machen, London Adventure, 14. Arthur Machen, “A Fragment of Life,” in The White People and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2011), 215.

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57. Freeman, “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany,” 248. 58. Christine Ferguson, “Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen, A. E. Waite, and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction,” Journal of Victorian Culture 21, no. 1 (2016), 54. 59. Machen, Hieroglyphics, 11. 60. Lehmann Imfeld, Victorian Ghost Story and Theology, 44; Machen, Hieroglyphics, 39. 61. Lehmann Imfeld, Victorian Ghost Story and Theology, 44. 62. Lehmann Imfeld, Victorian Ghost Story and Theology, 51. 63. Kimberly Jackson, “Non-evolutionary Degeneration in Arthur Machen’s Supernatural Tales,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (2013), 124. 64. Machen, “The White People,” 114. 65. Machen, Far Off Things, 125. 66. Freeman, “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany”; see also Freeman’s, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) for discussion of Machen’s representations of London. 67. Arthur Machen, “The Idealist,” in The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Presenting the city of London as a weird and mystical space or borderland is recurrent in weird fiction: see Lord Dunsany, “‘The Hashish Man’ ‘the Beggars’ ‘the Field’,” in A Dreamer’s Tales (London: George Allen & Sons, 1910); Tim Earnshaw, “Strange Magic,” in Arthur Machen: Artist and Mystic, ed. Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson (Northampton: Carmaen Books, 1986). 68. Machen, “A Fragment of Life,” 215. 69. Similar epiphanies happen in some of Blackwood’s stories, such as “May Day Eve” and The Centaur where “false” scientific or materialist knowledge is discarded in favour of true awareness. See S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), 88–90, for comparison of Machen’s and Blackwood’s worldviews. 70. Machen, “A Fragment of Life,” 200, 217. 71. Machen, “A Fragment of Life,” 220. 72. Lehmann Imfeld, Victorian Ghost Story and Theology, 58. 73. Lehmann Imfeld, Victorian Ghost Story and Theology, 71. 74. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 61. 75. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, 63. 76. China Miéville, “On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) Not Cannies,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 3 (2012), 381. 77. Joshi, “Introduction,” xiv.

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78. Arthur Machen, “The Shining Pyramid,” in The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 236. 79. Aaron Worth, “Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History,” Victorian Literature and Culture 40, no. 1 (2012), 220. 80. Worth, “Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History,” 223. 81. Machen, Far Off Things, 95, 97. 82. Jackson, “Non-evolutionary Degeneration in Arthur Machen’s Supernatural Tales,” 130. 83. Hurley, Gothic Body. Hurley links Hodgson’s “abhumans” from The Night Land to Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “abject.” 84. Miéville, “On Monsters,” 381; China Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sheryll Vint (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 113. 85. Worth, “Introduction,” xiv. 86. Worth, “Introduction,” xiv. 87. Machen, “The Great God Pan,” 7. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 88. Eckersley, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen,” 283. 89. See, e.g., William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (London: J. Burns, 1874). 90. Jake Poller, “The Transmutations of Arthur Machen: Alchemy in ‘The Great God Pan’ and The Three Impostors,” Literature & Theology 29, no. 1 (2013). 91. Machen, “The White People,” 115; Machen’s biographers and critics point to his dislike not only of scientific materialism, but also of many forms of occultism and Christianity; see, e.g., Freeman, “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany,” 252; Luckhurst, Telepathy, 203. 92. Anne Stiles, “Introduction,” in Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920, ed. Anne Stiles (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 3; see also Rylance, Victorian Psychology, and Oppenheim, Other World, 266, on finde-siècle psychology’s “stark choice between determinism and free will” in explanations of how the brain works. 93. Natasha Rebry, “‘A Slight Lesion in the Grey Matter’: The Gothic Brain,” Horror Studies 7, no. 1 (2016), 13. 94. Jeffrey Michael Renye, “Panic on the British Borderlands: The Great God Pan, Victorian Sexuality, and Sacred Space in the Works of Arthur Machen” (diss., Temple University Libraries, 2013), 15. 95. Stiles, “Introduction,” 13. 96. Eckersley, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen”; Mark De Cicco, “‘More Than Human’: The Queer Occult Explorer of the Fin de Siècle,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 1 (2012); and Machen’s reputed sexual anxiety is critically discussed in Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 149.

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97. Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 147. 98. Eckersley, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen,” 283. 99. Darryl Jones, “Borderlands: Spiritualism and the Occult in Fin-de-Siècle and Edwardian Welsh and Irish Horror,” Irish Studies Review, 17, no. 1 (2009), 37. 100. Poller, “The Transmutations of Arthur Machen”; Ron Weighall, “Sorcery and Sanctity: The Spagyric Quest of Arthur Machen,” in Arthur Machen: Artist and Mystic, ed. Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson (Oxford; Northampton: Carmaen Books, 1986); and Machin, Weird Fiction in Britain, 147–48. 101. Renye, “Panic on the British Borderlands,” 149. 102. Machen, Far Off Things, 155. 103. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 302. 104. Machen, Far Off Things, 20. 105. Rebry, “A Slight Lesion in the Grey Matter.” 106. Machen, Far Off Things, 123. 107. Machen, Far Off Things, 124.

CHAPTER 3

Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit

Weird tales are sites of experiment, narrative laboratories in which alternative systems of knowledge and knowing can be imaginatively tested. The analogy—of narrative as laboratory experiment—may sound like a contradiction in terms, conflating two very different schemes of knowledge. But this is just what the weird mode does; it creates an imaginative space wherein things—entities, concepts, schemata of knowledge, worldviews— that conflict in the real world can be reconciled, with remarkable and horrifying results. To better understand how it does so, this chapter explores four stories about weird scientific experiments: a brief return to Jekyll and Hyde, followed by a closer look at Machen’s “The Inmost Light” (1894) and two of Edith Nesbit’s short stories, “The Three Drugs” (1908) and “The Five Senses” (1910). These tales subvert the heartland of rigorous modern science, the laboratory, by combining the methods of chemistry and surgery with borderland epistemologies that suggest radical revisions of the relationships between body, mind, and spirit. The subject of each experiment is sometimes the scientist himself, sometimes another person, but always a human being, made up of body and mind: the only instrument apparently capable of knowing the world psychically or spiritually as well as physically. Empiricism, the basis of scientific knowledge, finds new forms in these stories; it is reconstructed out of a commingling of spiritual and physical sensory capacities, while valid knowledge itself is shown to extend beyond the empirical and include the soulful, personal, emotional, or social. © The Author(s) 2020 E. Alder, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_3

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In Chapter 2, I examined what weird versions of reality based on borderland science look like in Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan, and, through them, began to explore where limits to positivist and materialist understandings of the world can be found. In this chapter, I investigate what a corresponding weird epistemology might look like: the kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing upon which weird realities are based. These, too, derive from borderland sciences whose discourses existed in tension with the nineteenth century’s prevailing positivist frameworks. What comes to be known, in these weird stories, eludes the order and control that positivist science was supposed to acquire over the world’s phenomena. Instead, each experiment and its outcomes get disastrously out-of-hand. For all the scientist-protagonists’ radical vision and ambition, they are dogged by positivism’s legacies; even though their beliefs about what reality is are unorthodox, they hold, at least at first, to conventional scientific approaches to understanding it, which turn out to be inadequate. The doctor in Nesbit’s “The Three Drugs,” for example, believes there is an unseen dimension to the world, which he can access using scientific methods and with the assumptions that it can be rationally understood and will offer some profound new truth. Like Jekyll and Dr. Raymond, what he finds, however, is unreliability, instability, and unpredictability; these stories test the limits of positivism as a way of knowing the world even as they take fright at the implications of possible alternatives.

Body and Spirit as Ways of Knowing The grip of positivist science as a guide to understanding the world in nineteenth-century Britain had much to do with the persuasiveness of its underlying epistemological principles, in which “knowledge comes only from sense experience and logical mental operations.”1 In this formulation, reality was what was empirically observable (directly or by instruments) and the world’s phenomena had rational, physical explanations (not divine, magical, or supernatural ones). This external reality, transmitted by the body’s senses, undoubtedly existed, and could ultimately be understood to the point of certainty as nature gradually yielded its secrets through the steady application of the scientific method.2 These assumptions were enshrined in the emphasis placed on empirical evidential proofs and in prevailing ways of thinking about sensory knowledge and its relationship with the intellect.

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Nevertheless, observed T. H. Huxley in an 1881 essay, “On Sensation and the Unity of Structure of Sensiferous Organs,” the “sensory operations” were “the battle-ground of philosophers.”3 The central question was about the relationship between mind and body: Do direct sensory experiences give rise to mental life, or have people innate mental qualities such as reason in which originate understanding of the world? Huxley’s conclusion is that certainty in knowledge depends on both. The sensory experience and the intellectual comprehension of it happen simultaneously and therefore present as a unity: a sensation is “an intuition – a part of immediate knowledge.”4 He distinguishes between the sensation (the smell) and the thing that causes the sensation—the “sensorium” (a particle of scent from a plant). His essay and his reasoning belong to widely constituted debates about the relationship between the real and the observed world, particularly distinctions between direct empirical realism (which rests on the assumption that the senses with which we observe the world are reliable and provide unmediated facts about reality for the mind to comprehend) and representative realism. The latter recognises that the facts we inspect are not really the external objects of heat, a book, the ring of a bell, the taste of lemons, or the smell of smoke, but a sensation in our skin, an image transmitted by our eyes, the effect of vibrations in our ears, and so on. The fact we inspect does not necessarily match the reality of the thing itself, and further sets of information and beliefs come into play to help us to determine, as far as we can, what is true.5 Ernst Mach, a leader of the 1880s and 90s school of “empirocriticism” that sought radical revisions in empirical epistemology, emphasised the ways in which reality was constructed only out of what we could observe of it. For Mach, there was no “realm of ‘reality’ […] behind the realm of appearance.”6 Sensations, he wrote, are not signs of things; but, on the contrary, a thing is a thought-symbol for a compound sensation of relative fixedness. Properly speaking the world is not composed of “things” as its elements, but of colors, tones, pressures, spaces, times, in short what we ordinarily call individual sensations.7

Reconsiderations of the nature of sensory experience and its relation to either interior mind or external reality raised awkward questions about what could be said to be “true” about the world, and how reliably it could be said. Huxley found some security by taking the middle ground.

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Sensations, he concludes, are “immaterial entities,” things of the mind, but they have as “real existences as any others.”8 A reality created by the mind is a valid reality, but only when related to the physical, observable world (with observation understood as not limited to sight).9 This 1880s climate of epistemological debate promises well for the weird tale. Here, conceptual spaces open up for weird realities that are both subjective immaterialities and grounded in an objective reality. They are natural not supernatural, yet not restricted to a narrow materialist outlook, yet not dependent on theological belief either: it becomes possible to know a secular expanded world. Huxley’s agenda, ultimately, is to make clear that not only does knowledge not come from body or mind alone, it does not come from God either; he dwells on the physical structure of nose, eye, and ear to emphasise their biological explicability. The stories of the weird tales discussed in this chapter all pivot in one way or another on sensory experience, its relationship with the mind, and the knowing (and limits to the knowing) of a more-than-visible world. The five senses were, and are, the human instrument’s primary source of direct knowledge about the world and yet they cannot operate totally unaffected by mental interpretation or response. Huxley saw the sense organs as processors of the physical world rather than transmitters and compared them to factories: “sensiferous apparatuses are, as it were, factories, all of which at the one end receive raw materials of a similar kind – namely, modes of motion – while, as the other, each turns out a special product, the feeling which constitutes the kind of sensation characteristic of it.”10 And in some epistemological formulations the senses did directly convey external reality to the mind.11 In The Five Gateways of Knowledge (1856), professor George Wilson painted such a picture when he wrote: These gateways – which we otherwise name the Organs of the Senses, and call in our mother speech, the Eye, the Ear, the Nose, the Mouth, and the Skin – are instruments by which we see, and hear, and smell, and taste, and touch; at once loopholes through which the spirit gazes out upon the world, and the world gazes in upon the spirit.12

As “gateways,” Wilson’s senses are not processors but “loopholes” through which “world” is directly observed by “spirit.” In a divinely made rather than naturally evolved world, it was inconceivable that human senses (created by God) should imperfectly perceive the world He also created.

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In their different ways, however, Wilson and Huxley both present mechanised bodies subservient to spirit or mind (two categories that were often conflated): the body’s sensory organs are “apparatuses,” “factories,” and “instruments.”13 Mind (or spirit) is required to interpret the “products”; the body itself has no meaning-making agency (except that the site of reason itself, the brain, was also part of the body). Calling sensory organs “instruments” aligns the body with the latest communication technologies, often also used to explain the working of psychical phenomena like telepathy.14 Oliver Lodge explained that just as a signalling key in London causes a telegraphic instrument to respond instantaneously in Teheran […] so the danger or death of a distant child, or brother, or husband, may be signalled, without wire or telegraph clerk, to the heart of a human being fitted to be the recipient of such a message.15

Using technological analogies to construct the body as instrument turned not just its normal senses but also its spiritual knowing into a more reliable, objective system of detection. On both sides of spiritual and scientific debates, it was necessary to secure knowledge claims by appealing to empirical principles. To claim valid status, other kinds of knowledge (such as the spiritual, the magical, the artistic, the social) would have to be brought within the same framework of reason and evidential proofs, as Auguste Comte pioneered with sociology, and as the Society for Psychical Research, and many spiritualists and Theosophists, endeavoured to do with psychical phenomena.16 Weird fiction, or, rather, a weird epistemology, contests the hierarchy of intellect over instrumental body, as we will see, although the scientist characters in the stories I’m about to discuss all think at first that bodies are subservient and can be used as instruments of knowledge-gathering and control. Conceiving bodies as instruments compared them to the apparatus of the laboratory experiment, whose precise measurements were relied upon to produce objective knowledge.17 Sensations, after all, were ephemeral, not constant and permanent like mathematical laws.18 Not all phenomena could be bodily sensed, anyway, and human senses themselves, despite forming the basis of empirical knowledge, could also be capricious. Analogies between instruments and bodies, therefore, reinforced both as reliable empirical tools: the scientist as tool of observation, the subject or apparatus as tool of measurement.19 The position of the positivist scientist

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is at a distance from his or her experiment, receiving and interpreting but not influencing the results. Objective and unswayed by personal feeling or interest, such evidence could be more readily relied upon as accurate, contributing to stability and certainty about the nature of reality and the capacity of science to apprehend it. In the context of occultism and the spiritualist séance, a number of these issues spike. As already discussed, collapsing the distinction between matter and spirit was a key tactic of spiritualists and Theosophists in the battle to establish some higher realm of meaning to existence in natural, physical terms. This move also opened the spiritual dimension to empirical enquiry, as something on which both sensory observation and instruments of measurement could be brought to bear, to demonstrate the reality of psychical phenomena beyond question: “If mediums could be subjected to laboratory experiments, the results, surely, would be as conclusive as any findings from a chemist’s flask.”20 In a successful séance, spirits might take on visible material bodies and leave physical traces of writing, sounds, or touches; Victorian spirits themselves were “objects of proof, capable of leaving traces and being sensed.”21 Understanding mediums’ bodies as types of instrument presented them as mechanically as Huxley’s sensiferous apparatuses, and presenting their unique sensitivity as a kind of sixth sense helped spiritualist or psychic knowledge to position itself as empirically equal to that acquired by the usual five senses.22 For Helena Blavatsky, the occultist must develop the facilities of consciousness in order to “probe the inmost secrets of Nature [and] transcend the narrow limitations of sense” and be able to gather scientifically equivalent (which is not to say conventionally empirical) facts.23 This logic was used by psychical researchers as well as by occultists. In a 1911 lecture, W. F. Barrett argued that an unspecified sixth sense “feels” unseen facts about the world, and therefore psychical phenomena need not violate the assertion that “all knowledge must come through the senses,” the only “recognised channels.”24 Indeed, these phenomena ought to be more compatible with conventional science than unobservable forces, energy, and atoms, because empirical evidence could be directly observed. But disagreement existed between believers and sceptics over what it was that had been observed, who decided, and how.25 What passed for reality during the séance appeared to be multiple, hard to pin down, and based on more than what was strictly observable and measurable—in other words, rather weird.

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The career of medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886) provides a good example.26 Writing in the Cornhill Magazine in 1904, Andrew Lang reviewed Home’s career, dwelling on the multiple accounts of his séances that circulated privately and in the press, and on phenomena such as levitations which scientific investigators could neither explain nor expose as fraud. Lang’s discussion shows some of the challenges that séances presented to empiricism. No one account of reality is offered; instead, observable materiality and intangible immateriality coexist. Home’s hands are simultaneously present but ungraspable; a table is in two places at once. As Lang reports, W. B. Carpenter, one of spiritualism’s most prominent antagonists, complained that The most diverse accounts of a séance will be given by a believer and a sceptic. One will declare that a table rose in the air, while another (who had been watching its feet) is confident that it never left the ground.27

The evidence of sight, in this case, apparently could not reliably yield a single truth. Neither could touch: those who seized Home’s, or the spirits’, hands “could not hold them. The hands melted away, so people said.”28 For Lang, the mystery of Home “is solved by no theory or combination of theories, neither by the hypothesis of conjuring, nor of collective hallucination, nor of a blend of both.”29 Lang uses the language of science: of problem-solving, theory, and hypothesis. He acknowledges its inadequacy to address the problem, but it remains the only discourse available to him for evaluating and determining “facts.” To an extent, the séance itself invited scientific readings. It was laid out rather like an experiment, replicating certain conditions (such as darkness, hand-holding, the presence of a medium) to produce certain results (such as knocking, spirit forms, writing). So the séance looked like it ought to be amenable to scientific investigatory methods and to facilitate experimental tests, mediums submitted to being tied up, encaged, or attached to measuring equipment; it became “perfectly acceptable for a medium to be first searched, then tied around the neck, wrists, or body with tape, cotton, or silk thread.”30 This very cooperation, however, partly subverted the terms on which the knowledge generated by the séance claimed to be based. Tie the medium up too tightly and communication with the spirits is impeded; tie her (for it was very often her) too loosely, and there is too much scope for fraud. Imposing experimental conditions, rather

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than eliminating doubt, potentially interfered with the sitting and created more doubt. In addition, for a successful séance, active involvement was required from the sitters. Not only were their testimonies crucial, but each individual, body and mind, had to be invested in the séance for it to be successful, which was at odds with the position of the distanced positivist researcher. By holding hands, sitters formed a “community of sensation” promoting the right harmonious atmosphere for communicating with spirits.31 The presence of a sceptic could be detrimental. In 1885, the spiritualist weekly Light recounted the failure of slate-writing observations by SPR members with medium Mr. Eglinton: “[t]he sensitive and his controls, feeling that they were surrounded by a hostile prejudging audience, were thus paralysed.”32 Spiritualists asked only that sceptics kept an open mind; self-respecting scientifically minded people could hardly refuse, when spiritualists themselves allowed that “[h]onest scepticism is no barrier to the enquiry, but prejudice and superstition are undesirable everywhere.”33 Yet such a requirement meant that the sceptic could be accused of possessing a “spirit of opposition” if they did not engage honestly with the séance, and if they did, that made them complicit as a participant rather than objective as an observer.34 Arguably, many spiritualists did not fully understand the scientific methods they were trying to use.35 Either way, rather than providing empirical evidence which would lead to acceptance of the results, by relying on pre-existing faith among its participants a séance could effectively turn the scientific requirement for rigorous and replicable experimental conditions against the healthy positivist scepticism that was supposed to accompany it. In this way, theory, methods, and evidence combined to construct the séance as something amenable to positivist science, but in practice it enacted something quite fundamentally oppositional. As Richard Noakes points out, “[b]y maintaining that the causes of spiritualistic phenomena involved both disembodied and embodied intelligences, [spiritualists] were also denying that physiologists and others holding materialist views of the mind had the sole right to reliable knowledge in spiritualism.”36 Value placed on personal, spiritual forms of knowledge as well as dependence on theories and methods that mainstream science did not accept made spiritualism a challenging practice on several levels. Witness testimony was an important part of evidence for phenomena, though of course, “[t]he situation sketched out in the anti-spiritualist

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discourse was one in which the credulity of the spectators of spiritualistic séances acted against the very notion that they could witness the truth.”37 However, valuing pre-existing faith over dutiful scientific scepticism and distance was consistent with spiritualist ontology; the significant roles of the spirit and sensitive psychical feeling logically followed belief in the existence of souls and their invisible survival after bodily death. Whether spiritualists realised it or not, séances were operating according to a hybrid blend of positivist and anti-positivist methods—which did not in fact lie comfortably together. Positivist assumptions that there is one truth to reality and that it can be witnessed or apprehended, but only by an open-minded (not credulous) observer, were incompatible with spiritualist epistemology in which faith and individual, multiple, spiritual experience represented valid knowledge. It is this epistemological radicalism that makes spiritualism, especially as practised in the séance, such important fertiliser for weird fiction. This point, too, carries forward into other areas of fin-de-siècle occult such as Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Secret, ritual, and mystic, the occult seemed to be at odds with the openness of rational and empirical enquiry, but was often seen by practitioners as an alternative kind of science, pursuing questions that couldn’t be answered by conventional methods.38 The Golden Dawn’s teachings, Susan Graf explains, “posit the Kabbalah as a symbol system that makes the cosmos intelligible to the limited mind of man,” indicating the movement’s recognition of its alternative epistemology.39 Theosophy, similarly, could be positioned as a science based on expanded notions both of matter and of empirical sensory observation; as Annie Besant put it, “[w]hile ordinary science confines Matter to the intangible, Theosophical science extends it through many grades, intangible to the physical but tangible to the super-physical, senses.”40 Although on some level endeavouring to use positivist science to bolster their claims to valid knowledge, occult knowing relied on a revised epistemology that included multiplicity, subjectivity, and a dissolved border between material and immaterial. This is an epistemology ready-made for weird fiction, and accordingly the rest of this chapter examines stories that reconfigure scientific epistemology weirdly.

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Dr. Jekyll’s Self-Experiment Following the analysis in the last chapter of Jekyll and Hyde as a weird tale, I revisit Jekyll’s experiment here to examine its epistemological basis. It is significant that Jekyll experiments on himself, collapsing his own mind, body, and spirit into a single test site. Jekyll, evidently, is a medical doctor, with expert knowledge of chemistry, as revealed by the complex pharmaceutics observed by Lanyon as Hyde mixes the antidote.41 Yet he is no conventional materialist scientist and makes clear his discovery derives from interdisciplinary studies leading “wholly towards the mystic and the transcendental.”42 His researches probe metaphysical questions extending beyond the normal empirical range of conventional scientific enquiry, asking similar questions to those posed by occultism about the relationship between body and spirit (his language is usually of “spirit” and “soul,” not “mind”) in the make-up of the self. Thus Jekyll comes to recognise that the body’s apparent stability and the conventional material limits of the world are an illusion: “I began to perceive,” he reports, “more clearly than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mist-like transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired” (56). The body, rather than the spirit, becomes something ghostly; as a “fleshly vestment” (66), it is something worn by rather than constituting the self, demonstrating literally what Jerrold Hogle calls the novella’s “polymorphic body language.”43 Jekyll finds that a person’s existence is not confined to one physical form but is somewhat more fluid, and is spiritually rather than biologically determined; his body is the “mere aura and effulgence of certain of my powers that made up my spirit” (57). Roger Luckhurst notes the uncertain and non-deterministic place of the body in Jekyll’s “Statement,” remarking that Jekyll’s “account of the revivified body sounds vitalist, even spiritist.”44 Jekyll’s account recalls mediums’ physical manifestation of spirit forms, especially those which occupied or took on the flesh of the medium’s body. His spirit, moreover, is also amenable to chemical—that is, materialist—manipulation. In Jekyll’s laboratory, “the self becomes as fluid and transformable as the chemicals which he mixes together.”45 His drug, like a medium’s psychic capacities, offers a means by which one set of the spirit’s “powers” (the “aura and effulgence” that form the body) “should be dethroned from their supremacy and a second form and countenance substituted” (57). Jekyll’s experiment enacts a spirit manifestation from

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a séance, in which, according to The Spiritualist , it seemed that “spirits, when clothing themselves with matter, find it most convenient to take the material form of the instrument through whom they act.”46 Simultaneously it models the related psychology elaborated by Frederic Myers, in which, as Janet Oppenheim summarises, the self was a not particularly well integrated bundle of parts; strata and streams of consciousness did not form one seamless web, but remained distinct entities. […] Whatever its constitution, it [personality] was liable to abandon its own home, leaving that vulnerable to invasion and possession by another personality.47

Jekyll’s experiment is a psychological one as much as a chemical, spiritual, and physiological one. In both séance and experiment, spirit and body can be separated, with the body taking on a new form according to the “elements in [the] soul” that “stamp” it (57). The goal of Jekyll’s experiment is to isolate one strand of the subject’s being, to separate the “polar twins” (56), which he learns it is possible to do with scientific methods and the help of chemical agents. The moment at which a “side light began to shine upon the subject from the laboratory table” (56) is critical to his progress; the empirical side of science, as represented by the lab, provides the philosophical side with practical means. Jekyll’s experiment sets itself out as the final test of a carefully researched and devised hypothesis, taking place under replicable conditions (both potion and antidote are, after all, remade and retested many times, and when the antidote fails, the cause is fairly readily traced to a single variable of the unknown impurity in the salt). The theoretical knowledge that Jekyll gains from his researches and his experimental development of the requisite chemical compound must be tested on his body for a full, experiential, empirical knowledge of its effects to be gained. As in a successful séance, in a successful weird experiment maintaining a sceptical distance will not do, only commitment to participation. Jekyll is directly involved in the experiment as subject as well as researcher. Jekyll chooses not to observe the effects of his experiment on a research subject (as we have seen Raymond does on Mary in The Great God Pan, and the doctor of “The Three Drugs” does on Roger, discussed shortly), but to test his potion on himself. Professor Boyd Thompson makes the same choice of self-experimentation (for more explicitly ethical reasons) in Nesbit’s “The Five Senses.” Self-experimentation, often

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with gases or drugs, was not an uncommon practice among nineteenthcentury scientists (as Humphry Davy and colleagues did by inhaling nitrous oxide), intended to extend the basis of empirical scientific enquiry while maintaining the rigour of the scientific method through careful experiment and observation.48 Whether he chooses to self-experiment for reasons of ethics, ambition, or arrogance, Jekyll doesn’t say. Arguably, however, the experiment could only work, or could only yield any meaningful knowledge, through direct experience of it—experiences that couldn’t be observed from an objective distance, only from the inside. He is clear that he made his discovery in relation to his own self; he informs us that he advanced “in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man” (56). Further, Jekyll’s particular attitude appears to be an essential ingredient in the experiment. As he reflects, Had I approached my discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth an angel instead of a fiend. (59)

Individual motivation is clearly a powerful shaping force, yet these reflections suggest he would have needed to be already virtually saint-like to alter the results; agency lies on the weird side of the experiment as well as on the scientific. Nevertheless, Jekyll’s personal involvement and state of mind seem as crucial to his experiment’s outcomes as they would be to the success of a séance. Jekyll’s “Statement” serves as a written report of the experiment and his observations. He records spiritual as well as physical sensations; after he takes the potion, “[t]he most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death” (57). The core of the experiment collapses the boundary between the empirical knowledge gained conventionally from the body’s five senses, and that acquired by the spirit. When the pain passes, Jekyll feels something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its novelty, incredibly sweet […] within I was conscious of a heady

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recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy. (57)

In this first moment, Jekyll acquires his knowledge of being Hyde through his senses united with his mind; he is “conscious” of the “heady” rush of sweetness and sensual experiences. This knowledge is vivid, but also strange, new, and indescribable; although his experience is real and intense to him, it still remains slightly out of reach. The weird experimental method is superior to the ordinary kind, and so is the quality of the knowledge gained. Jekyll gains it immediately, compared to the slow self-recognition of the old doctor who took so long to “reach years of reflection, and [begin] to look around me and take stock of my progress and position in the world” (55), and gains it incontestably: “I knew myself,” he declares, “at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil” (57). Jekyll is instantly and absolutely sure of what he knows, to the extent of putting a numerical multiplier on its severity, which paradoxically ties, albeit more figuratively than literally, the relative concept of “wickedness” to the eternal truths of mathematics. In keeping with the earlier declared immateriality and transience of the body, Jekyll’s self-knowledge of his physical appearance comes only second: “I stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had lost in stature” (57). The mirror reveals Hyde’s younger, slighter body with its “imprint of deformity and decay” (57), his inner wickedness marked on his physical form. The state of the spirit stamps the shape of the new body. Yet proof of the new knowledge has a bodily manifestation as well as a spiritual one; neither has supremacy, and the line, if there is one, between spirit and matter is blurred. Any balanced dualistic relationships set up earlier in the narrative are now irretrievably upset or undermined. Despite Hyde’s elusiveness and resistance to pinning down, as discussed in Chapter 2, a revised, weird epistemology does offer possible ways of knowing the weird—at least, for those, like Jekyll, who are prepared to get sincerely and directly involved. Jekyll’s commitment to his own experiment might be the most honest thing he ever does. Between them, Jekyll’s experiment and the narrative’s representation of Hyde establish some ontological and epistemological foundations that become important for weird fiction, drawing from an 1880s scientific climate in which a number of options for knowing the world coexisted. There are

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many commonalities between Jekyll and Hyde and the three tales I examine next. Explicitly set in those spaces of incontrovertible scientific authority, laboratories, all four are stories of experiments whose subjects take on the role of medium, becoming instruments for accessing an other world under experimental conditions. Sensory experience for most of these subjects extends beyond the usual five senses; the knowledge of the spirit or soul is admitted as valid, and leaves physical traces in or as a body as distinctions between matter and spirit or mind crumple. Constructions of the human body as mechanism or instrument, of scientists as objectively detached, and of will or consciousness as biologically determined are both offered and undermined. Assumptions that stable truths about the world can be attained are resisted; instead, the stories posit inherent unknowability, instability, and multiplicity. Existing discourses are shown to be inadequate, so that weird knowledge remains out of reach. Language struggles to represent it. Brains (human ones anyway) cannot hold it and must either lose it or go mad. The narratives do not present straightforward anti-scientific attacks; rather, they critique assumptions of certain kinds of science and their limitations. In its place, they imagine a reconstruction of methods and knowledge that complements the weird reality of their storyworlds.

“Brain of a Devil”: Arthur Machen’s “The Inmost Light” In “The Inmost Light,” Dyson (who also features in The Three Impostors , and other tales) investigates the mysterious death of Mrs. Black, the wife of a doctor, in connection with his glimpse of a demonic face at the Blacks’ window and a phrase of code on a scrap of paper. The latter leads him to retrieve a jewel (containing the titular “inmost light”), and Dr. Black’s pocketbook which reveals what remains of the story: that he devised a method to exchange his wife’s soul for “what the mind cannot conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death itself” and afterwards, as he had promised her, killed her.49 “The Inmost Light” works with many of the same ideas as The Great God Pan, even to the point of some identical passages, but dwells, as I will explore, much more on the neurological operation itself and the puzzles posed by the state of Mrs. Black’s brain. The bodily beings of Mrs. Black and Mary both play shaping roles in the experiments’ outcomes,

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and are treated as neutral research subjects by the male scientists. I will first briefly revisit Dr. Raymond’s experiment in The Great God Pan by way of a bridge between Jekyll’s experiment just discussed and that of “The Inmost Light.” Dr. Raymond sees Mary as little more than a passive conduit for the “current” of the spirit.50 Passivity is necessary in as much as “[t]he true mystical experience is one not sought, but given,” and so Mary’s submissiveness is consistent with the well-planned conditions of the experiment.51 Yet her reduction to a piece of experimental apparatus also speaks to Raymond’s positivist stance: he plays the objective, distanced scientist (quite in contrast to the self-experimenting Jekyll who understands his own self to be at the epistemological centre of his experiment) conducting research upon a mechanical body and always remaining “perfectly cool” (14). The knife is a “necessary” part of the operation on her brain tissue that means “a spirit will gaze on a spirit world” (7). The spirit, too, becomes instrumental here, a device of empirical observation, which will, he wrongly thinks, “gaze on” but not interact with the spirit world. In his conception of the submissive Mary as an instrument whose body and spirit are under his control, Raymond fails to consider the personal involvement inherent in mystic experience and the impact of that involvement on the experiment’s outcomes. As Raymond administers to his subject a drug from a green phial, Clarke “watche[s] changes fleeting over [Mary’s] face as the changes of the hills when the summer clouds float across the sun” (14). Mary’s physical and mental self is evidently already involved in this experience. Following the operation on her brain, as, presumably, her spirit views or enters the world beyond, the results register visibly on her body. Her eyes, suddenly opened, “shone with an awful light, looking far away, and a great wonder fell upon her face, and her hands stretched out as if to touch what was invisible” (15). Mary responds both physically and emotionally to what she sees and strives (and perhaps succeeds) to know by touch what is invisible to the two onlookers. Body and spirit are both profoundly involved in Mary’s experience of the phenomenon, similar to Jekyll’s “racking pangs” and “horror of the spirit” the first time he takes his potion. Natasha Rebry draws the connection between body and soul here: “the alteration in Mary’s brain is simultaneously an alteration in her spirit.”52 Knowledge, as Huxley expressed it in the essay discussed earlier, is a simultaneity of experiencing and comprehending; in Machen’s story, the spirit or soul is part of that knowing. Body and mind also both participate, and the results of the experiment are

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inscribed on all three. Afterwards, Mary loses her reason and cannot intellectually communicate what she knows. Her body, however, records the results: her impregnation, bodily and soulfully, by “Pan.” In this sense, as with Hyde, spirit determines body, not the other way round; the meeting of spirits facilitated by Raymond’s scalpel has observable physiological effects. Mary’s full participation in the experiment is key. Her ecstasy is evident on her face, where too it is soon succeeded by “the most awful terror. The muscles of her face were hideously convulsed, she shook from head to foot; the soul seemed struggling and shuddering within the house of flesh” (15). Raymond proves his point that the human brain could allow the spirit access to the world beyond the veil, but nothing certain comes of it; whatever ecstatic, terrible truths Mary learns to remain mysterious and hers alone. Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, in her exploration of Machen’s artistic search for ecstatic experience, argues that “Machen’s concept of art follows Coleridge’s description of symbol (as opposed to fancy) as something participatory” and therefore leads to greater access to truth, whether divine or mystic; for Machen, “Cartesian assertion of human ‘truth’ repositions creative power and thus removes mystery.”53 Mary’s participatory experience reinstates it. A similar point is proved by Dr. Black in “The Inmost Light.” Dr. Black seeks esoteric knowledge, wishing to “gratify my desire of knowledge of a peculiar kind, knowledge of which the very existence is a profound secret to most men,” and, sort of, finds it (163). There is a delicious irony in the way this “secret” knowledge ends up picked over by other scientists and publicly displayed across newspapers and a courtroom, yet is rendered meaningless because nobody knows what to do with it. In this way, “The Inmost Light” is arguably an even more cutting attack by Machen on modern positivist scientific culture than is The Great God Pan. No wonder they were published together. Adrian Eckersley has argued that Dr. Black’s ambitions align him with Dr. Raymond and that the story is a “parallel with the task of science itself: it is the materialist scientist who has ripped the decent theological clothing from humanity and shown us a demon.”54 And yet dualisms of matter and spirit or demon and decent are insufficient, underplaying Machen’s complex take on science, occultism, and religion as well as obscuring how the text resists the stabilising effects of binary structures and absolute knowledge.

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Dr. Black is not a materialist scientist—or, not only. Like Raymond and Jekyll, he is both a materialist surgeon and an occult scientist who recognises that “[w]hen men say there are strange things in the world, they little know the awe and terror that dwell always with them and about them” (149). Dr. Black recognises the limits to knowing the world through conventional methods: “in the work I had to do there must be elements which no laboratory could furnish, which no scales could ever measure” (165). Conventional empiricism can only produce partial knowledge and understanding about the world. He has fewer illusions than Raymond about the nature of the knowledge he seeks and its rewards; his “paths,” he knows, lead to “regions so terrible, that the mind of man shrinks appalled at the very thought” (163). Dr. Black expresses, in effect, his sense of a weird numinous behind the everyday, not beyond a veil, but interlocked with the world we know. Further, where Dr. Raymond treats the spirit as a tool for gaining knowledge, Dr. Black better understands the significance of individuals’ essential being: to complete his experiment, he realises that “from some human being there must be drawn that essence which men call the soul” (165). There is no question of self-experimentation; his wife eventually consents to be the subject, with tears of shame, and in a barred and shuttered laboratory he “did what had to be done, and led out what was no longer a woman” (167). Mrs. Black’s soul is transferred to the “opal with its flaming inmost light” (167) and what remains is the thing whose face at the window horrifies Dyson so profoundly. Dr. Black suffers personally and morally from what he has done and his death follows, but it is only in a private letter to Clarke that Dr. Raymond acknowledges any regrets or responsibility, admitting that “[i]t was an ill work I did that night when you were present” (108). Clarke himself takes no steps to expose him, refusing Villiers the vital information that would help to halt Helen’s career. The Great God Pan presents us with a cold, arrogant scientist and a moral coward, and a narrative littered with fatal consequences of their action and inaction, but no public or narrative retribution visits either of them. The story’s target is not so much Raymond’s inhumane attitude towards the women as people (including Helen, for whom he disavows responsibility and ejects from his home at an early age), but rather his stance as a scientist.55 Dr. Black, too, escapes public exposure. He falls under suspicion of his wife’s murder, but, as Dyson learns from the newspaper report of the inquest, the doctors who conducted the autopsy of Mrs. Black’s body

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“could not discover the faintest trace of any kind of foul play; their most exquisite tests and reagents failed to detect the presence of poison in the most infinitesimal quantity” (124). Subtle and sensitive as these forensic tests are, the real nature of Dr. Black’s “foul play” remains hidden; he is not blamed for the “somewhat obscure and scientifically interesting form of brain disease” that is identified as the cause of death (124). Only a physiological cause can be officially acceptable in the prevailing medical culture, and no poison or pathogen can be found in the body. However, the autopsy does find that “[t]he tissue of the brain and the molecules of the grey matter had undergone a most extraordinary series of changes” (124). The action of the spirit has left its traces on the body, which are taken for marks of a physical disease; again, body and spirit (or soul or consciousness) are inseparable, but the epistemological significance of that passes unnoticed. On the basis of this evidence, the inquest concludes that death was of “natural” causes, and Dr. Black is acquitted. The real, unofficial conclusion of the (unnamed) doctor who examined the brain is rather different. The newspaper quotes his “curious” claim that the brain’s appearance “indicated a nervous organization of a wholly different character from that either of man or the lower animals” (125). But this claim fails to alter the course of the court hearing. It eludes pinning down to a meaning that would secure it as evidence: exactly what is a nervous system neither human nor animal, and in any case, what would that prove? No one knows. The empirical, observable evidence can be pointed to, but is essentially useless. Nevertheless, the doctor’s conversation with Dyson reveals him to be more open than most to the significance of this weird evidence. He is convinced that “in spite of all the theories, what lay before me was not the brain of a dead woman – was not the brain of a human being at all” (142); crucially, he reaches this conclusion “in spite” of neurological theory, not because of it. But this evidence cannot be assimilated to an officially accepted scientific framework, and consequently nothing can be done with it in an inquest which can only make decisions based on facts sanctioned by that framework. “[T]he verdict was given in accordance with the evidence,” the doctor later tells Dyson; “the jury acted very sensibly; in fact, I don’t see what else they could have done” (141). Scientific investigation of evidence and the judicial system built upon it both have limits as ways of knowing and ordering the world, or the weird. The best the doctor can come up with is that Dr. Black was “justified” in killing his wife because she had “[t]he brain of a devil. […] Whatever

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Mrs Black was, she was not fit to stay in this world” (143). The notion of a devil’s brain suggests a reassuring moral motivation for Dr. Black’s final action (though the necessity for it was his fault in the first place). However, attributing physical anatomy to a superstitious construct suggests that it is both material and immaterial—in other words, impossible, but there is no better descriptive language. The doctor’s discourse echoes the binary language of good and evil to which Jekyll resorts and is likewise insufficient. Other efforts to articulate what Mrs. Black has become operate through negation or absence. She, or her body, at least, becomes “what is no longer a woman”; what Dyson glimpses at the window is “the face of a woman, and yet it was not human” (121). There is no language to describe what is, only what isn’t. A similar moment occurs in The Three Impostors : “Miss Leicester” “cannot say I saw a face or any human likeness” when she sees something with burning eyes staring from her brother’s window.56 Like Hyde, and Helen, these weird entities are unknowable, emerging through the gaps and occlusions of what is known and how that is signified in language. Weird monsters are unspeakable, but weird tales endeavour to find ways to speak them. Weird fiction and science both meet the limits of language at encounters with new phenomena. Ernst Mach explained this point in The Science of Mechanics: “[i]n the reproduction of facts,” he wrote, “we begin with the more durable and familiar compounds, and supplement these later with the unusual by way of corrections. Thus, we speak of a perforated cylinder, of a cube with bevelled edges, expressions involving contradictions, unless we accept the view here taken.”57 The doctor’s choice of phrase—“the brain of a devil”—is the familiar supplemented by the unusual to become a description of reality that looks like a contradiction, but isn’t. Empiricism itself becomes weird when it operates at the limits of knowing. Weird tales don’t need to make science weird—it already is. The over-determined observability of “Mrs Black” and her devil’s brain provides the kind of longed-for unequivocal evidence for extra-human existence that eluded occultists: evidence that could be presented and verified at an inquest. Not only does this evidence fail to persuade because of failure to see it for what it is, but we are thankful for that. At the end of the story Dyson, in his horror, crushes the opal, and the “inmost light” is extinguished. In exploiting empiricism and rationalism at the same time as undermining it, Machen’s story both “proves” the existence of weird

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dimensions to what is thought of as reality, lurking behind the everyday world as it is normally experienced, while showing the evils—and the futility—of trying to use ordinary science to approach it.

Expanded Worlds: Edith Nesbit’s “The Three Drugs” and “The Five Senses” Like Jekyll and Hyde and The Great God Pan, Nesbit’s stories revolve around ambitious scientific experiments and the search for enhanced transcendental knowledge through the use of drugs and experiments. Each protagonist comes to know a weird new reality, to which the five senses, along with other kinds of feeling or observing, are central, while the plots turn on the limits of that knowing.

“The Three Drugs” In “The Three Drugs,” Roger’s encounter with an expanded world of knowledge is, like the other experimental subjects I have discussed, enabled by a scientific procedure, involving the administration of a sequence of drugs. Two of these “must be offered directly to the blood that absorbs it,” combining physicality and intellect into a single form of knowing.58 The story revises ways of knowing by tying mystical, psychological experience not just to the brain but to the body’s blood and nerves too, while the transiency and incommunicability of the insights and revelations that result ensure that they remain ultimately out of reach. The setting is Paris. The protagonist, a troubled young man called Roger Wroxham, takes refuge in an unknown house from a group of Apaches (as Parisian criminal gangs were known). It belongs to an unnamed doctor, who treats Roger’s wounds and offers him a bed for the night. As it turns out, the doctor’s treatment included administering the first of three drugs, making Roger a non-consenting participant in an experiment that aims “to make the superhuman” by opening consciousness to omniscience (53).59 When the experiment on Roger is a success, the doctor applies the first two drugs to himself. Since the second induces a passive state of submission, the third must be administered by another person, but the doctor has bound Roger to a chair. Without the third drug, the Elixir of Life, the doctor dies in a fit of terror, and Roger is rescued by his former assailants after passing an anguished day alone with the corpse.

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The narrative emphasises the importance of observation as a way of knowing external reality as well as its close connection with mental consciousness or awareness. At first, Roger is so oppressed by his personal troubles that he moves “blindly” through Paris with “little thought to spare for the detail of his surroundings” (44). Consequently, he is surrounded by his attackers in Montmartre almost before he realises where he is and why it is dangerous. In the ensuing struggle, he becomes acutely aware of “[t]he contact with these creatures, the smell of them, the warm, greasy texture of their flesh” (46). He pulls apart “two clammy hands” and hears something “clattering” in the gutter. A knife “bit sharply” at his arm and “at the sting of it Roger knew that he did not desire to die” (47). Sensations, here, generate self-knowledge and a consciousness that spurs him to action. The incident heightens Roger’s nervous sensitivity, reflected in the way he experiences the spaces around him. Escaping into the doctor’s house, a “spacious silence that soothed at first, presently clawed at the set, vibrating nerves already overstrained” (48). Like a sensitive instrument, his body responds to the world around him and his consciousness of what happens continues to be conveyed in detail through his senses. His awareness of sensory impacts remains acute; after the doctor’s initial treatment of his wound, he wakes to “the close intimacy of a bandage clasping his arm, and in his mouth the vivid taste of some cordial,” while it is primarily the doctor’s “gold-rimmed pince nez” that stand out visually (49). His heightened nerves and awareness turn out to be crucial for the experiment. For the doctor, Roger’s “perfect physical condition” makes him ideal for testing the three drugs, in contrast to the doctor’s previous doomed subjects who were “unsound. Decadent students, degenerate Apaches” (42). This perfection includes Roger’s brain; as the doctor exclaims, “God to be good to the Apaches who so delicately excited it to just the degree of activity needed for my purpose” (52). The assault, it seems, has warmed up Roger’s entire bodily system into the optimum state for expanding his consciousness and capacity to know the world. Roger is ready to enter a state corresponding closely to a mediumistic trance and the kind of psychological state marking mystic experience. In Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James describes mystic states as “states of knowledge. They are states of insight into the depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain.”60 The mystic state is marked by its “Transiency”: “half an hour,

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or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they [the revelations] fade into the light of common day” and are imperfectly remembered.61 Yet “[s]ome memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life of the subject between the times of their recurrence.”62 The third drug propels Roger along exactly this trajectory. Roger enters a profound state of insight and revelation, feeling himself at the centre of radiating threads that linked one to all knowledge past and present. He felt that he controlled all wisdom, as a driver controls his four-in-hand. Knowledge, he perceived, belonged to him, as the air belonged to the eagle. He swam in it, as a great fish in a limitless ocean. (55)

Roger not only has (temporarily) ownership and control over time, knowledge, and even the elements, he knows emotionally and intellectually that he has it (feeling it, perceiving it) at the same time as he physically experiences it (driving, flying, swimming), in a perfect union of mystical, empirical, and rational knowing. However, this limitless wisdom is transient, since it cannot be held by the mind in its normal everyday state. Roger gains only one piece of lasting knowledge, a piece of personal information of use only to him. At the story’s start, we learn that he has an unspecified “trouble”: “There was a woman in it, of course, and money, and a friend, and regrets and embarrassments” all woven into a “puzzleproblem” he can’t resolve (45). All he retains from his few moments of limitless knowledge is a solution, in words of “very simple wisdom”: “To end the trouble, I must do so-and-so and say such-and-such” (58). This knowledge would be meaningless to anyone else, to the extent that there is apparently nothing for a reader to gain by even knowing the details of the “trouble,” let alone of its solution. Roger’s personal mental as well as physical condition is a significant factor in the result of the experiment. Entry to this state of knowledge and insight depends on the subject being consciously ready to submit: “the whole life of the subject, risen to an ecstasy, falls prone in an almost voluntary submission to the coming super life,” the doctor tells Roger; “Submission – submission!” (54). Submission, indeed, was seen as essential to the mystic state.63 The “more pliable” a medium, for example, could be “beneath the will of others, the greater are his powers as a medium.”64 James identifies “Passivity” as another psychological marker of the mystic

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state: “when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”65 “I submit,” Roger confirms, and when his own turn comes, so does the doctor: “I submit – I submit” (54, 58). This time, submission will lead to disaster. There are hints that the doctor’s past actions (which include numerous animal vivisections as well as previous experiments on people) may be affecting his own experience of the drugs. He suffers more profoundly than Roger from the first drug; to Roger “it seemed that, either this man was less able to bear pain than he, or that the pain was much more violent than had been his own” (57). The second drug gives Roger a sort of psychic second-sight, enabling him to look through a locked door at the doctor’s previous victims, now “quiet people lying along the floor in their death clothes” (53) which further hints at the doctor’s remorseless callousness. But with the third drug withheld (since the bound Roger cannot administer it), for the doctor the second drug leads to a moment of fatal exposure to an overwhelming horror not unlike Mary’s in The Great God Pan: “I see what I will,” he claims, but he is wrong: “I close my eyes, and I see – no – not that – ah! – not that! […] Not that,” he moaned. “Not that,” and writhed in a gasping anguish that bore no more words. […] presently he writhed from the chair to the floor, tearing feebly at it with his fingers, moaned, shuddered, and lay very still. (59)

Like Mary, the doctor sees something beyond what is apparently visible and is swamped by the horror of it. Denial is futile; the will gives way under the impact of overwhelming experience. That experience is also beyond words—“not that” identifies, in negation, some nameless unknown, the realm of the weird, lying out of sight. Like Dr. Raymond, Nesbit’s doctor is ambitious and arrogant. He seeks to gain God-like wisdom, and he is entirely sure of himself and his achievement. The proofs Roger gives of the experiment’s success demonstrate to the doctor that “[i]t was not a dream, this, the dream of my life. It is true. It is a fact accomplished” (56). From this positivist stance, that absolute truths about the world are obtainable, the doctor has no doubts that the experiment will work equally well on himself: “I shall begin to be a new man. It will work quickly. My body like yours, is sane and healthy”

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(56). Based on his mechanical assessment of the health of body and brain, the doctor assumes that the experiment is replicable, but his emotions and his over-confidence betray him. The temporarily wise Roger perceives that he must be unbound to help with the third drug, but the doctor refuses out of fear: “no, and no, and no many times. I am afraid of you. You know all things, and even in your body you are stronger than I” (57). Instead, the doctor apparently supposes he can self-administer the third drug, but the first two drugs overpower him more than he expects. The second drug induces an almost paralytic submission, and the doctor cannot reach the third despite its being by his elbow. The doctor has also forgotten the accelerated action of the three drugs on Roger’s perfect body and mind; Roger’s state of knowledge and strength has passed, and he is now too weak to break his bonds. The story plays with ideas of will, submission and receptivity, turning submission itself into a form of agency. The doctor’s specific researches— he is a physiologist and a vivisector, experimenting first on animals and then on people who stray into the trap of his house—position him at a clinical distance from the experience of his research subjects. Retaining control of the administration of each drug, and assuming he would remain in control of the final self-experiment, he has failed to notice the crucial catch, that the third drug cannot be self-administered because the subject must be passive. The ethical success of the experiment depends on cooperation between researcher and researched; the inaction of either leads to disaster. In this way, the tale’s weird mode exposes flaws in scientific myths of control. The capacities of the human body for knowing can be extended beyond the usual range of senses and consciousness, and the knowledge to be gained is real, but a distanced positivist stance is not sufficient. The results sought by the doctor can only be obtained by surrendering one’s whole self, body and mind, to a greater power; only then can an expanded reality, a weird, more-than-visible reality, be experienced. For the human mind, what lies there on the edges of the known is overwhelming; contact may be fleeting and it cannot be fully mastered or apprehended—Roger retains a minute fraction of what he knew—and the ecstasy of weird experience may manifest as horror as easily as wonder.

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“The Five Senses” “The Five Senses” also tears back the veil created by the limits of the body’s ordinary sensory capacities, this time by intensifying the senses rather than extending their range. The story uses the imaginative freedom of the weird mode while working with some of the new epistemological thinking emerging at the fin de siècle. The protagonist, Professor Boyd Thomson, achieves his results by a series of self-experiments with a remarkable new drug. His work is described in terms not unlike Jekyll’s and Raymond’s interdisciplinary approaches, as “those dreadful researches which tend to merge the chemist and biologist in the alchemist and the magician.”66 His is a weird, hybrid, borderland science, embracing nonconventionally scientific forms of knowledge: “Like all imaginative scientists, he was working with stuff perilously like the spells of magic, and certain things were not possible to be foretold” (156). His chemically enhanced sensory experiences reveal new knowledge about the world, but also draw attention to the unreliability of empirical observation by presenting multiple sensory realities, co-existing just beyond the limits of everyday awareness. Set within a romance plot between the professor and his fianceé Lucilla, who rejects him for refusing to stop using vivisection, the experiment grounds personal, emotional consciousness in a reconfigured understanding of empiricism. The story exploits, as Vicky Margree demonstrates, “a dichotomy between science and the emotions” as well as a tension between a narrator most interested in scientific details and “an implied author and reader for whom it is something other than the scientific issues that are of consequence – namely, the emotional and perhaps the ethical ones.”67 After the professor’s overly successful experiments lead to nearly fatal consequences, Lucilla rescues him and, having gained a new capacity for empathy, he gives up his scientific career in favour of marriage. The relationship is thus foregrounded in the story as the means by which Boyd Thomson arrives at a healthier, more rounded understanding of the world. However, it cannot be separated from the terms of his selfexperiments, which bring him to the brink of hitherto unknown worlds. At first, Boyd Thomson has no room for emotion in his worldview; the supremacy of the “high ideals of the new science” in governing how the world is to be understood is self-evident to him (152). For him, there is no question that the widespread medical benefits to human beings are worth the suffering of animals, although, in the tradition of Victor

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Frankenstein and Doctor Moreau, he is primarily driven by the “fever of scientific curiosity” rather than philanthropy. To him, Lucilla seems to him to “unreasonable, narrow, prejudiced” (152). Her emotional response— “I understand that dogs are tortured. I can’t bear it”—is coupled with her flat refusal to listen to reason: “‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to hear’” (151). Margree, however, argues that “neither antagonist is presented as being entirely in the right”; the “emphasis on [Lucilla’s] bourgeois parental home […] appears to suggest the partial grounding of her opposition to vivisection in naivety and convention.”68 Lucilla’s reaction is attributed to her upbringing; in the house where this conversation takes place, “[e]very article of furniture in the room spoke eloquently of the sheltered life, the iron obstinacy of the well-brought-up” (151). While the story mostly, in the end, bears out Lucilla’s anti-vivisectionist perspective, it modifies rather than rejects scientific enquiry. Valid knowledge expands to include contributions from non-positivist realms such as the magical, ethical, and emotional; empiricism itself supports a more fluid and multiple understanding of what reality is made of, suggesting that even weird realities have a basis in observable fact. After the break with Lucilla, Boyd Thomson throws himself into his research. He discovers that an unusual drug chancing to be in his possession has the capacity to dramatically intensify sensation. It is “an unaccredited, wild, magic, medicine obtained by a missionary from some savage South Sea tribe and brought home as an example of the ignorance of the heathen. And it worked a miracle” (152). Ever the careful scientist, however, he proceeds to “make sure of the cause, to eliminate all those other factors to which that effect might have been due. He experimented cautiously, slowly. These things take years, and the years he did not grudge” (152). He follows the scientific method and gains a great deal of mastery over the drug’s use (how to direct its efficacy to one sense or another, for example). By this, however, he is also borrowing from and validating a different system of knowledge and belief. The “unaccredited” drug is the active ingredient in his concoction; the beliefs held by the “ignorant heathen” in “wild, magic, medicine” are thus shown to be well-founded. Further, he, like Jekyll, is committed to a path which unavoidably leads him to abandon the position of distanced, objective researcher and get directly involved in his own experiment. To “achieve his ambitions of glory” (158), he must test a “human rabbit”—himself—because without it, there can be no certainty about the drug’s capacities:

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He knew that this drug with others, diversely compounded and applied, produced in animals an abnormal intensification of the senses; that it increased – nay, as it were magnified a thousand fold, the hearing, the sight, the touch – and he was almost sure, the senses of taste and smell. But of the extent of the increase he could form no exact estimate. (154)

It is only through his own experience, through the embodied results measured and reported by his senses, systematically tested in turn, that he can gain a full knowledge of the experiment’s outcomes. In doing so, he glimpses the weirdness behind the quotidian world. The intensification of each sense is so remarkable that it reveals, in effect, the unobservable worlds that lie out of reach of normal experience, as each altered sense exposes hidden subtleties. His enhanced hearing, for example, makes audible a fly’s footsteps and the movements of glass bottle stoppers, while under intensified sight he sees vague shapes he later concludes “were the microbes and bacilli that cover and fill all things, in this world that looks so clean and bright” (156). Through the efficacy of the “wild, magic” ingredient, Boyd Thomson acquires empirical knowledge of phenomena to a level unavailable to normal senses or instruments. His enhanced senses push back the boundary between the realm of reality and the realm of appearance; he can see and hear tiny things that normally are not humanly observable. Knowledge, here, is constructed as neither stable nor absolute, either empirically or intellectually, but as subjective and relative. He might have expected increased certainty about the world at a more detailed level than ever before, but what he gets is a shifting multiplicity, shaped in part subjectively, according to how the scientist mobilises his will, in a way more suggestive of quantum than traditional mechanics. Boyd Thomson finds that sensory knowledge offers more than one simultaneous truth. His enhanced touch, for example, reveals two coexisting versions of reality as he holds a syringe: “When he looked down at his fingers, he saw that what they grasped was the smooth, slender tube of clear glass. What he felt that they held was a tremendous cylinder, rough to the touch” (154). Realities multiply as the professor’s experiment accentuates the way in which the two senses supply conflicting rather than corresponding information. Neither sensation gives any more “true” a knowledge of the syringe than the other, though much depends on where the mind directs its attention:

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He examined the new phenomenon with cold care. It seemed that only that was enlarged on which his attention, his mind, was fixed. He kept his hand on the glass syringe and thought of his ring, got his mind away from the tube, back again in time to feel it small between his fingers, grow, increase, and become big once more. (154–5)

One effect of the “unaccredited, wild, magic” drug is to alter the relationship between mind and senses in the process of observation. The drug not only intensifies sensory observation but increases the mind’s capacity to know at will the aspect of the world currently being observed. As a consequence, Boyd Thomson’s stance as a scientist in relation to this knowledge also has to move beyond the positivist position of objective distance and mastery. As long as he applies the drug to only one sense at a time, Boyd Thomson maintains his “cold” detachment and proceeds systematically. However, his detachment gradually decays as each sense brings startling experiences. Sight, which he saves for last, offers the most profound transformation of his observed world: “the whole of the stable earth seemed to be suddenly set in movement, even the air grew thick with vast overlapping shapeless shapes” (156). What was once constant and empty is put into motion and populated. The experience overturns Boyd Thomson’s remaining faith in definitive knowledge, as through the intensification of his sight, the “stable” reality he thought he knew is most profoundly revealed as an illusion. This imagined experiment demonstrates arguments put forward by physicists such as William Crookes against extreme empirical reasoning like that of Mach’s. Richard Noakes explains that The argument for the subjectivity of interpretations of phenomena was a warning to those who took “too terrestrial a view” and denied the possibility of an unseen world. Crookes insisted that the unseen world to which he was referring was not the “spiritual or immaterial world” but the “world of the infinitely little” whose dimensions were comparable to the size of homunculi, the wavelengths of X-rays, and the mean free path length of molecules.69

Boyd Thomson’s experiment shows that there is indeed a (normally) unseen world. What he sees is not the infinitely little, but it is little enough to prove the point; if microbes can be revealed to the naked eye simply by enhancing it, then logically greater enhancement, if it could be

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procured, would even more precisely observe the true reality is beyond everyday experience, but that always there, out of reach. Although Boyd Thomson can later offer an explanation of what he saw (microbes and bacilli), the experience at the time is profound and overpowering enough to make him think twice about what he is doing; the weird world he experiences is somewhat beyond what he can handle. He is particularly affected by “the little things that were no longer little, the invisible things that were invisible no longer” (156). There is indeed, it seems, a populated reality beyond the veil of everyday experience, yet one which contains the potential for horror that even a scientist is not quite ready to deal with; the professor feels “grateful for the first time in his life, for the limits set by Nature to the power of the human body” and “could not but feel that success, taking the bit between its teeth, had gone just a little bit too far” (156). Nevertheless, he has not learned yet. He concludes that the logical next step is to take all five versions of the drug at once, reasoning that with all five senses intensified he will acquire the “supreme” power of a “demigod” (156). He is right about the effects, but wrong about his ability to use them; he has not quite acquired the mastery over the physical world he thought he had. Though alive, though “hearing, taste, touch, scent and sights were intensified a thousandfold,” he becomes “as powerless as a cat under kurali” (159). Thus, the professor experiences for himself the helplessness of his own former animal experimental subjects, and his magnified senses produce horrors: intolerable charnel scents, a distended sense of time, earwigs and beetles appearing as giant monsters. Totally paralysed, the professor is taken for dead. Anticipating unforeseen sideeffects, however, he has taken the precaution of leaving instructions to his servant Parker to visit him in the family mausoleum every day for a fortnight. Now Boyd Thomson suffers the consequence of his longstanding failure to recognise that human emotions and their irrationality and unpredictability matter. Parker is too spooked to enter the vault and the Professor is left alone until saved by Lucilla, brave and loving enough to enter the tomb and approach close enough to notice he is conscious. As a result, with “an awakened heart” (163) and a new respect for the value of emotional feeling, he naturally renounces his researches in favour of marriage and farming. However, the narrative ends with rumours that he is resuming science, albeit confined to “extending paths already well trodden” (162). The conclusion is thus rather ambivalent. Well-trodden paths, after all, need not

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exclude vivisection. Boyd Thomson’s ambition and cold scientific detachment may be criticised, but Lucilla’s blanket rejection of his methods and her refusal to listen or enter discussion aren’t fully condoned either. One point seems clear, though. Chastened by “the depth of that gulf of fear which lies between the quick and the dead,” Boyd Thomson has left the radical researches of the weird scientist behind him (163). The wondrous breakthrough of his discovery is overshadowed by the horror of where it might lead. The limits to the capacity of a human being in understanding and operating in the world are exposed, and turn out to be a built-in safety feature; there apparently is more to reality and the world’s phenomena than most people can cope with knowing, which is a recognition that lies at the heart of the weird. A full understanding of the world, therefore, is not to be found by pushing empiricism beyond its natural limits, but by opening oneself to additional ways of knowing. “The Five Senses” undermines the notion of a single direct unmediated and absolute truth based on empirical observation, by showing how sensory experience provides multiple simultaneous version of reality. By questioning a severely materialist, rationalist scientific worldview, it makes the point that other kinds of knowledge must also be recognised as valid for a meaningful understanding of the world.

Conclusion In these stories, weird realities are not amenable to conventional ways of knowing. Once questions about how we know reality are raised, the possibility of reality being other than what we thought can follow, and other forms of knowledge than disinterested, objective and observable facts about nature can and must be taken into account or revealed. Jekyll’s indeterminate self, Machen’s often-demonic “world beyond the veil,” and the expanded sensory reality and ocean of wisdom of Nesbit’s stories all conceive new ontological dimensions. Knowing these extended worlds requires the observation of the senses added to the feeling of the spirit and undergoing some form of intellectual processing. The nature of the self as discovered by Jekyll wouldn’t yield to a model that separated mind or spirit from body, or distanced the researcher from experiment, or constructed the world in neat binaries. The hidden worlds and others with which Raymond, Black, and Nesbit’s doctor connect their subjects can only be known by body, mind, and spirit. Success relies on the discovery of a physiological basis to spiritual knowing, but that alone

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is shown to be inadequate. The nature of Helen, Mrs. Black, and the world of knowledge briefly acquired by Roger prove resistent to the conventional epistemological frameworks; they elude being known. “The Five Senses,” by contrast, demonstrates the indelible materiality of the world and the power of the body’s physical and mental apparatus to know it, but reveals material reality itself to be multiple and unstable. A weird reality, as Chapter 6 also explores, does not require another world beyond the veil—it can also be lifted in this one. These weird tales reconfigure ways of knowing as well as what there is to be known. Without rejecting science, these narratives target the limits of a purely materialist, positivist stance as an adequate way of knowing the world. They unsettle conventional hierarchies of intellect over feeling, human over nature, mind over body. Chapter 4 follows by examining scientist figures who do manage to reconcile disparate forms of knowledge, who have adapted their minds and instruments, and generally succeed against weird horrors and realities where this chapter’s scientists fail.

Notes 1. Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines,” in The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 7. The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 214. 2. See Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Ted Benton and Ian Craib, Philosophy of Social Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). On the scientific method, see Peter Kosso, A Summary of Scientific Method (London: Springer Science & Business Media, 2011). 3. Thomas H. Huxley, “On Sensation and the Unity of Structure of Sensiferous Organs,” in Science and Culture (London: Macmillan, 1881), 249. 4. Huxley, “Sensiferous Organs,” 263. 5. Charles Landesman, Introduction to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 22. 6. John Losee, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 147. 7. Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, trans. Thomas J. McCormack (London: Watts & Co., 1893), 483. 8. Huxley, “Sensiferous Organs,” 259. 9. Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and John Henry, Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis (London: Athlone, 1996). 10. Huxley, “Sensiferous Organs,” 269.

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11. Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge, 3. 12. George Wilson, The Five Gateways of Knowledge (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1856), 1–2. 13. On mechanised bodies in the Victorian period, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 37–38, 103–4. 14. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Jill Nicole Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); and Richard Menke, “The Medium Is the Media: Fictions of the Telephone in the 1890s,” Victorian Studies 55, no. 2 (2013). 15. Oliver Lodge, “Thought Transference: An Application of Modern Thought to Ancient Superstitions (1892),” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 4, Telepathy and the Society for Psychical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 12. 16. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) applied the term “positivism” to this style of scientific thinking in his Treatise on Positive Philosophy (1830–42)/Cours de Philosophie Positive, in an attempt to validate sociology as scientific knowledge The Essential Comte, Selected From Cours De Philosophie Positive, trans. Margaret Clarke (London: Barnes & Noble, 1974). 17. Lissa Roberts, “The Death of the Sensuous Chemist: The New Chemistry and the Transformation of Sensuous Technology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 26, no. 4 (1995); Keir Waddington, “More Like Cooking Than Science: Narrating the Inside of the British Medical Laboratory, 1880–1914,” Journal of Literature and Science 3, no. 1 (2010). 18. David F. Lindenfeld, The Transformation of Positivism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 83. 19. On experimenters’ bodies as instruments of knowing, see Simon Schaffer, “Self Evidence,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992), 362; on experimental subjects as instruments, see Winter, Mesmerized, 62–66. 20. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 200. 21. Shane McCorristine, “Introduction,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 3, Spiritualism and Mediumship, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), xiv. 22. See, for example, W. T. Stead, “‘The Law of Psychic Phenomena’ [Book Review],” Borderland 1, no. 1 (1894); A [Anon.], “How Many Senses Have You?,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol.

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24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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4, Telepathy and the Society for Psychical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012). H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, Vol. 1 (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888), 477. William Fletcher Barrett, “Seeing Without Eyes,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 4, Telepathy and the Society for Psychical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 307. Richard Noakes, “Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits,” in Bodies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 155. On the séance and questions of evidence, see, e.g. McCorristine, “Introduction”; Richard Noakes, “Natural Causes? Spiritualism, Science, and the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain,” in The Victorian Supernatural, ed. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Noakes, “Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits.” Quoted in Andrew Lang, “Historical Mysteries IV: The Strange Case of Daniel Dunglas Home,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800– 1920, Vol. 3, Spiritualism and Mediumship, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 269. On William Benjamin Carpenter, see Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, 287–305. Lang, “Historical Mysteries IV: The Strange Case of Daniel Dunglas Home,” 263. Lang, “Historical Mysteries IV: The Strange Case of Daniel Dunglas Home,” 271. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 68. McCorristine, “Introduction,” vii. Noakes, “Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits,” 8; Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 69; A [Anon.], “The Telepathy Theory,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 4, Telepathy and the Society for Psychical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 141. J. J. Morse, “The Study of Psychic Phenomena. How to Investigate,” Borderland 1, no. 2 (1894). M. A. [Stainton Moses] Oxon, “How to Hold Séances,” Borderland 1, no. 1 (1894), 53. Oppenheim, Other World, 200–1. Richard Noakes, “The Sciences of Spiritualism in Victorian Britain,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 34.

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37. McCorristine, “Introduction,” ix. 38. See Egil Asprem, “Science and the Occult,” in The Occult World, ed. Christopher Partridge (London: Routledge, 2014); Egil Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror of Late Classical Physics,” Aries 11, no. 2 (2011). 39. Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press [SUNY], 2015), 12. 40. Annie Besant, Theosophy (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1912), 21. 41. Mark Griep and Marjorie Mikasen, Reaction! Chemistry in the Movies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 42. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2003), 55. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 43. Jerrold E. Hogle, “The Struggle for a Dichotomy: Abjection in Jekyll and His Interpreters,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 163. 44. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 193. 45. Michael Davis, “Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and Late-Victorian Psychology,” Journal of Victorian Culture 11, no. 2 (2006), 211. 46. [Anon.], “Spirit Forms,” The Spiritualist 3, no. 29 (1873), 451. 47. Oppenheim, Other World, 260. 48. Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide (1800) [Facsimile Reproduction] (London: Butterworths, 1972), 453–559. 49. Arthur Machen, “The Inmost Light,” in The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (London: John Lane, 1894), 166. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 50. Arthur Machen, “The Great God Pan,” in The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (London: John Lane, 1894), 7. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 51. Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, The Victorian Ghost Story and Theology: From Le Fanu to James (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 51. 52. Natasha Rebry, “‘A Slight Lesion in the Grey Matter’: The Gothic Brain,” Horror Studies 7, no. 1 (2016), 11. 53. Lehmann Imfeld, Victorian Ghost Story and Theology, 61. 54. Adrian Eckersley, “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen: ‘Degeneration,’” ELT 35, no. 3 (1992), 285.

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55. See Rebry, “‘A Slight Lesion in the Grey Matter’,” for discussion of the gender and ethical issues involved in the choice of women as experimental subjects in these two stories. 56. Arthur Machen, The Three Impostors (London: Everyman, 1995), 119. 57. Mach, Science of Mechanics, 483. 58. Edith Nesbit, “The Three Drugs,” in In the Dark (Wellingborough: Equation, 1988), 54. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 59. A comparable situation appears in one of Blackwood’s short stories, “Max Hensig,” in which Williams through alcohol achieves a state close to clairvoyance that gives him, briefly, unusual perception, concentration and motor control; Algernon Blackwood, “Max Hensig,” in The Listener and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907). 60. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 302. 61. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 302. 62. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 303. 63. Nick Freeman, “Arthur Machen: Ecstasy and Epiphany,” Literature and Theology 24, no. 3 (2010), 248. 64. [Anon.], “Mediumship,” The Spiritualist 3, no. 14 (1873), 210. 65. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 303. 66. Edith Nesbit, “The Five Senses,” in In the Dark (Wellingborough: Equation, 1988), 162. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 67. Victoria Margree, “The Feminist Orientation in Edith Nesbit’s Gothic Short Fiction,” Women’s Writing 21, no. 4 (2014), 437. 68. Margree, “Feminist Orientation,” 437–38. 69. Richard Noakes, “The ‘World of the Infinitely Little’: Connecting Physical and Psychical Realities Circa 1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39, no. 3 (2008), 324.

CHAPTER 4

Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson

Based on the experiences of characters in weird tales discussed so far, a better understanding of weird phenomena requires not a rejection of science, but a revised version of it, incorporating occult elements. Additionally, it appears to require certain personal qualities—an open mind and humility (as we have seen, those who approach the weird in arrogance have reason to regret it). This chapter explores three short story series from the 1890s and 1900s revolving around characters who understand, more or less, what they’re dealing with: E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low, Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, and William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki. All three series (and there are other examples of their type) are detective stories in which the mystery (usually a haunting) is thought to be weird or supernatural, and the sleuth is a man of particular psychic or occult powers or skills.1 This expert figure, like Sherlock Holmes and other popular crime detectives, wields the power of knowledge to explain, categorise, and contain the weird phenomena experienced by his clients. Compared to scientists of Chapter 3, weirdfinders are more informed about the seriousness of what it is they tackle at the brink of the unknown and have wellgrounded confidence in their capacity to deal with it. Low and Silence are not only learned but have trained mental powers on which they often rely; Carnacki is not a psychic, but instead combines esoteric research and modern technologies. In different ways, the stories use occult science as © The Author(s) 2020 E. Alder, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_4

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the foundation of a new profession, and work to reassert human (and male) scientific control over weird unknowns. Weirdfinders are constructed as trained experts, but not as positivist scientists. Their toolkit is a varied array of knowledges and methods. They are open-minded but not sceptical; they don’t conduct their investigations from an objective distance, they get involved, body, mind, and soul. They step into the medium’s role, but they don’t adopt a medium’s passivity any more than they adopt a scientist’s distanced control. Rather, they tread a middle ground in which a new kind of professional identity is forged. It is a masculine identity; supposedly feminine qualities of sympathy associated with mediums, for example, are essential for weirdfinding but are subordinated to the weirdfinder’s will. Their expertise elevates occult practices to a place in mainstream society and asserts authority over the weird encounter, while at the same time making weird realities more “real” than ever.

The Weirdfinding Profession The naming of sleuths is a difficult matter. Flaxman Low is described as a “psychologist,” even as an “occult psychologist” in the title of one collection2 ; John Silence is a “physician extraordinary” and “the Psychic Doctor”; Carnacki is a “ghost-finder,” although what he “finds” are rarely so neatly identifiable. Despite the varying nomenclature, the stories and the sleuths have much in common and reward discussion together. Nevertheless, finding an adequate descriptive single term can be tricky. Smaji´c titles one chapter of his book “Psychic sleuths and soul doctors”; Mark De Cicco selects “occult explorer,” and Marilena Parlati uses “psychic doctors/detectives” and “occult detectives” in her discussion of this subgenre.3 Like them, I consider the terms “doctor,” “psychic,” “occult,” and “detective” individually restrictive or inaccurate for discussing the whole, and propose my own contribution: weirdfinder. While it is no better or worse than the alternatives, it does two things for my current argument: focusses attention on what is “weird” about these encounters, and signals what distinguishes these fictional figures from others who resemble them. Low, Silence, and Carnacki are qualitatively different from Stevenson’s, Machen’s, and Nesbit’s doctors. H. P. Lovecraft later observed that “Dr. Silence is one of those benevolent geniuses who employ their remarkable powers to aid worthy fellow-men in difficulty.”4 These are not lone

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researchers pursuing borderland science for their own ends, but working experts who, like Sherlock Holmes, are called upon by their clients for help to deal with strange and dangerous phenomena. In the process, they create a new profession based on the realising of occult and psychical theories and practices: weirdfinding. For Lovecraft and S. T. Joshi, the detective casebook formula is a major flaw. For Lovecraft (who felt similarly about the Carnacki stories), the John Silence tales are “[m]arred only by traces of the popular and conventional detective-story atmosphere,” while Joshi calls Blackwood’s whole concept of the psychic detective “grotesque”: “Blackwood, in having the know-it-all Silence obtrude, usually at the end, with a prosy explanation of the phenomena, introduces a fatal element of rationalism into something that should not be rationalized.”5 There is a case to be made for this view that rationalisation spoils what would otherwise be a perfectly good weird tale. Roger Luckhurst suggests that the problem lies in “the fusion of opposed genres of discourse: the rule-bound, denotive statements of science with the playfulness of literature.”6 In Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, as we will see, Hodgson exploits the mismatch between Carnacki’s expert truth claims and his wildly far-fetched experiences to ludic, almost parodic effect. In Blackwood’s case, the Silence stories are not better at being weird tales than, for example, “The Willows,” “The Wendigo,” and “The Man Whom the Trees Loved.” But they can be understood as a different kind of weird tale. The Low, Silence, and Carnacki stories, I argue, become weird because of the presence of the weirdfinder and his ability to identify and explain— if not always to solve or eradicate—the haunting in question. Discussing the popularity of story series about these figures in her Night Visitors, Julia Briggs notes that “a character of this sort conferred a certain continuity on diverse material while himself gaining in authority and interest.”7 His explanation “need not detract from the terrors of the tale, since it does not explain them away, but merely reveals some sort of logic of cause and effect behind them.”8 The success of such a story is due to its method of linking the weird mystery to a scary but recognisable phenomenon, making it terrifying because, rather than despite, its having natural causes. Thus, the horribleness of a Flaxman Low story where dreadful events turn out to be caused by the spores of an unusual efflorescent fungus (“The Story of Konnor Old House”) works as effectively as the one about a zombie that can be felt and tasted but not seen (“The Story of Yand Manor House”).

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Weirdfinders are a new kind of scientific figure, dealing with new kinds of haunting. Literary predecessors to this figure include Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius from “Green Tea” and other stories collected in In a Glass Darkly (1872), while Dr. Lloyd from Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story is credited by Julia Briggs as “the first mesmeric doctor in English literature, though […] he had several notable forebears in life.”9 Mike Ashley cites Samuel Warren’s 1833 Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician as the earliest forerunner of John Silence, but notes that the premise was “given great impetus by the creation of the SPR.”10 Like psychical research, fin-de-siècle weirdfinders arose in part from the nineteenthcentury popularity of mesmerism, but were also doing something new. Tracing this development, Michael Cook points to the interventions made by the Flaxman Low tales: “If the Hesselius tales were essentially ghost fiction with a dash of pseudo-scientific thought, then the arrival of the Flaxman Low stories saw a genuine fusion between the detective story and supernatural fiction.”11 In the late Victorian and early Edwardian cultural context of weirdfinding, science, gender, and ghosts were figured differently than they had been earlier in the century. “[G]hosts, phantasms, and spirits” may belong to old traditions, Peter Keating observes, but they also seemed new. As one commentator noted in 1900: “The old spectre of our childhood with his clanking chains has faded into nothingness in this age of inquiry. If he appears again it is in a new character and he must at least be civil to the Society for Psychical Research.”12

The “new character” of the ghost was as something scientifically explicable—or at least explicable in scientific language and, if not as a ghost, then as something else. The SPR was less interested in verifying spiritualist claims about communication with the other world than in explanations for phenomena like thought reading in terms of “nervous stimuli,” “radiant energy,” “synchronous vibration,” or other electrical or magnetic means.13 When Frederic Myers did define a ghost, it was as “a manifestation of persistent personal energy,” a “force [that] is being exercised after death.”14 The description fits many of the phenomena encountered by Low, Silence, and Carnacki well, albeit that Myers’s “passive, accidental, and largely benign” forces contrast with the “active, wilful, and malignantly Satanic” manifestations of many weirdfinding tales.15 If such manifestations were

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indeed human relatives surviving in the spirit world, all was well, but occult practices risked channelling evil personalities too, or might “urg[e] us towards evil if our spirits are open for evil.”16 Magnetism, etheric vibrations, forces and energies, electric instruments—such language populates discourses of physics, occultism, psychical research, and weirdfinding alike, not only inflecting weirdfinding tales with scientific reasoning but profoundly reshaping the nature of the hauntings weirdfinders investigate. The weirdfinder almost invariably identifies an unconventional combination of causes producing a weird phenomenon entirely unlike ordinary revenants. To remind of some of China Miéville’s arguments outlined in Chapter 1, the weird enacts a rationalising of the irrational that is nevertheless unable to reduce it; it is about the positing of something impossible – whether not-yet-possible or never-possible – and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real.17

Weirdfinding stories perform this break and demonstrate this paradox. The weirdfinders’ cases often present characteristics familiar in gothic or ghost stories—haunted houses, vampires, and past misdeeds resurfacing to cause mischief in the present—and, without the weirdfinder’s intervention, there they would remain. But he defines a weird reality, supported by a unique system of knowledge built out of ancient secrets, contemporary occultism, and the rationally impossible abilities or methods of the weirdfinder himself. To this end, the detective story format is essential; weirdfinding tales offer a variant on a narrative model well-established by the 1890s. Critics Srdjan Smajìc and Michael Cook have both examined the relationship between the detective story and the ghost story more broadly, with Cook arguing that “the ghost story […] was actually a building block of the detective fiction narrative” rather than its antithesis.18 Weirdfinding tales make a haunting the focus of a detective story, and they deploy scientific methods to explain the mystery. That Sherlock Holmes applied science to the solving of crimes would, Cook points out, have made sense to contemporary readers: “After all, science was truth; more and more, it was becoming associated with solutions to the intractable problems of the world, it enabled that which was hidden to be seen, and that which

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was unknown to be recognised.”19 Weirdfinder tales just push the border of truth further towards the unseen and unknown. Yet Hilary Grimes has shown how saturated Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories themselves are in spiritualist traits, including in Holmes’s modern methods, reliance on insights, and his own person: “despite assumptions that Holmes and photography were the epitome of ruthless, rigorous figuring, they were nevertheless sensitive to invisible elements normally undetectable to rational perception, such as the supernatural.”20 She argues that Holmes himself functions like a photographic plate, sensitive and receptive to insights. Weirdfinders share such traits, but they are rooted in a different conception of reality. The gap between Sherlock Holmes and a weirdfinder is not particularly big—the main difference lies in what it is that is solved and the knowledges yoked to do so. Weirdfinding tales break both with traditional detective stories and with traditional ghost stories. Smajìc notes this contrast: Holmes’s “craving for the sensational does not extend beyond the boundaries of the natural world,” while Flaxman Low is “overtly fashion[ed] […] as the kind of detective one would seek out after someone like Holmes had declined to involve himself in a more outré case.”21 Just as Holmes makes himself master of specialist knowledges, weirdfinders undertake their own specific training and carve out their own professional niche in occult science and detection at a time when science was becoming increasingly specialised and professionalised. The word “scientist” itself was only coined in the 1830s and even when Conan Doyle and the Prichards (i.e. the Herons) were writing, “science” as a profession was still fairly young and marking off its areas of expertise—including from psychical research as well as occult magic.22 Janet Oppenheim summarises the situation as she sees it in the 1880s: In this period, as British science emerged from the grip of gentleman amateurs to achieve a professional status both in academe and industry, trained scientists were likely to feel uneasy about a group like the SPR. In part, too, the scientific profession feared that spiritualism and psychical research threatened to reintroduce into modern science those links with magic and the occult from which it had only recently broken free.23

The notoriety of the scandalous figure of Aleister Crowley, for example, did little to give the occult a good name, though he worked hard to

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treat magic as science.24 To be credible as professionals (although, following Holmes, none of my weirdfinders ever issue an invoice), weirdfinders work to avoid the damage of association with the questionable scientific reputations of occultists and psychical researchers at the same time as reinstating “those links with magic” credibly. For John Silence, “occultism” is “that dreadful word!”—but he still speaks its language.25 Nonetheless, the diversity of late nineteenth-century science made a conducive climate for a professional like Silence: The rise of spiritualism, the discovery of atomic particles, and the theories of forces unavailable to the human eye all cast a more supernatural light on the contemporary sciences. The scientist added to this increased paranormality; professionalization was creating a scientific culture that was more and more unintelligible for a lay audience, and with a lack of understanding comes a sense of mystery and occult.26

A paranormal scientist would not seem out of place in an environment where science itself looked “paranormal” and he may, in fact, be absolutely required. Whatever the phenomenon, William Crookes argued, “[i]n investigations which so completely baffle the ordinary observer, the thorough scientific man has an extraordinary advantage” due to his precise and trained methods and knowledge.27 Here, Crookes defends psychical research on the grounds that it is science’s obligation to investigate spiritualist phenomena, but his remark could apply equally to the baffling marvels of physics. The SPR insisted that “we can accept no arbitrary ‘scientific frontier’ between them [psychical phenomena] and the nature that we all know.”28 Flaxman Low would agree, declaring “[y]ou know I hold that there is no such thing as the supernatural; all is natural […] We need more light, more knowledge.”29 Low, Silence, and Carnacki appear to know more than most, presented in ways designed to avoid some of the pitfalls that undermined psychical research and spiritualism, as well as those that lead the scientists of Chapter 3 into disaster or near disaster. They more successfully adopt an epistemological stance in which the personal knowledge of the spirit is as valid as that of the body and intellect, which is possible partly because in their storyworlds, such knowledge is already accepted as valid, and not just by the lone researcher. In weirdfinding tales, the reality of the weird is public knowledge. Clients call upon weirdfinders for help because they are already convinced,

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rightly or wrongly, that they have a weird haunting to deal with and need expert help. In this way, weirdfinders evade the “mad scientist” trope also prominent at this time, a trope that, Anne Stiles describes, “traces its roots to the clinical association between genius and insanity that developed in the mid-nineteenth century” and “coincided with the growth of scientific professions.”30 To an extent, Low, Silence, and Carnacki could easily follow in the “mad scientist” vein—they are educated, intelligent, and, like Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Moreau (and most of the fictional scientists I have discussed so far), “unmarried [and] single-mindedly devoted to research.”31 Joachim Schummer’s take on the modern “mad scientist” of the nineteenth century was that he “did harm primarily to other people through his obsession with playing God.”32 Weirdfinders, however, set out to help, and generally succeed. Silence, for example, takes no payment but possesses “[t]he native nobility of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help themselves” (1). It is obviously important for weirdfinding stories that their clever experts cannot be dismissed as either mad or, as I will come to, feminine. The clients, whether men or women, usually have unreliable or incomplete impressions, or incorrect theories of their own, while the weirdfinders’ trained minds means what they observe and assert is accepted as fact. Their intelligence and extensive knowledge are presented not as genius but as a rational mind put to the discipline of solid hard work and specialist education. In Marilena Parlati’s words, they are exceptional individuals whose expertise is and must remain unrivalled; their uniqueness as human beings allows them to adopt all possible methods of inquiry, occult ones included, and yet ensures the stability and power of systematic education, qualifications and police.33

As (implicitly independently wealthy) experts motivated to help people and solve occult mysteries, weirdfinders are hardly socially subversive, in that they work with rather than against publicly recognised structures and institutions. But at the same time, these systems are what makes it possible to professionalise the occult. Significantly, weirdfinders benefit from the greater opportunities, of scientific education and working at a profession, that are available to them as men.

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As men, they are less subject to the marginalisation experienced by fictional women doctors and detectives.34 Yet they also require that particular nervous or psychological apparatus associated with women’s mediumship. Women were considered to be particularly successful as mediums because they were more sympathetic, sensitive, and finely tuned to ghostly or telepathic transmissions.35 Indeed, “both the Spiritualists and their antagonists elaborated the electrical mysteries of the telegraph into a theory of woman as technology.”36 The passive, instrumental bodies of mediums were therefore often subject to an expert operator—their spirit control, or their sitters. The medium may be in a trance, or bound to a chair in a cabinet as a guard against fraud, or simply part of a circle of joined hands. Spiritualist as well as psychical researchers’ rhetoric around mediums explicitly represented them as technology: sensitive, passive, and controllable technology. According to an 1873 article in The Spiritualist , Just as some of the best telegraphic instruments require to be under the care of a skilled electrician, and not an ordinary clerk, even so should a very sensitive medium be surrounded by experienced Spiritualists only, that the best results may be obtained.37

The medium, here, becomes a delicate instrument in need of care by the trained expert. Nevertheless, spiritualism offered many women mediums, often of lower classes, a social empowerment otherwise difficult to obtain.38 So too did writing; as Hilary Grimes demonstrates in relation to late Victorian women ghost-story writers, “authorship, ghostliness, and female identity are closely entwined.”39 As a result, women’s knowing takes a distinct gendered form. It counters claims for universal truths based on an epistemology assuming a masculine norm, but was not necessarily recognised as an acceptable replacement. Susan Schaper notes that “[f]emale ghost-seeing […] is profoundly equivocal in Victorian culture. It can serve as a testimonial to woman’s highly developed sensitivity” but “can also indicate psychological instability.”40 To ensure distance from such associations, the Low stories break with “haunted house” narrative conventions of connecting hauntings with unmanly superstitions. They present occult investigation as a serious matter for the professional man’s enquiry and, at the same time, “[annex] the home as a male space”:

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The men who gather at the haunted house […] resemble a hunting party, scientific expedition, or group of military officers planning a coup against an elusive enemy, and the house itself is constructed as a battleground, a laboratory, or a supernatural dark continent.41

In such spaces, women and their activities are marginalised. The gendered difference of women’s lived experience extends to epistemology. Fictional women detectives, for example, as Joanna Wargen shows, were marginalised as knowers or discoveries by androcentric nineteenthcentury scientific institutions and systems of knowledge.42 The male weirdfinders, however, are able to operate in both spheres of masculine and feminine knowing and spirituality or, perhaps, collapse and reconfigure them into one new sphere of operation. Andrew Smith describes an internal crisis in hegemonic masculinity at the fin de siècle as the dominant masculine scripts became pathologised.43 Male weirdfinders use their occult and psychical expertise to combat that sense of crisis through a construction of an alternative masculine and professional identity. Sage Lesley-McCarthy argues that “[t]he uncontested masculinity of Flaxman Low and the other professional psychic detectives is […] intrinsically connected to their status as trained occultists, rather than ‘dabblers’ in the mystical.”44 Weirdfinders accordingly develop their mental faculties through occult training along the lines of the Golden Dawn. “All of the occult work within the Golden Dawn,” Susan Johnston Graf explains, “was trained on elevation and control of consciousness,” including “evocation” of subconscious energies and “invocation” of divine energies; “[t]he imagination and the will were the key elements of the human psyche with which the Golden Dawn ritual magician worked.”45 Through occultism, men could regain some of the authority lost to women with their feminine spiritual apparatus, because the occult offered a way to be manly as well as psychical or magical. Alex Owen argues that as “masculinity was assuming a variety of different faces” in the 1890s, “the occult offered men the possibility of a direct spiritualized experience of the other world that avoided the feminized connotations of spiritualist mediumship.”46 Pitfalls included avoiding the passivity of the ecstatic state, for example, through the exercise of willpower. Willpower, Owen notes, was closely associated with what Victorians referred to as the “masculine temperament,” and the will was considered by many physicians to act as the

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guarantor of manly health and efficacy. […] Within occult circles, however, the will was to be tutored and honed as the essential attribute of the magician regardless of distinction of sex.47

Occultism offered broadly egalitarian opportunities for success, but its reputation in wider culture was shaky. Weirdfinding stories therefore fall back on, or recreate, a more robust masculine script, incorporating the emphasis on individual will. Weirdfinders tread the line between their sensitivity and their selfcontrol, taking occultism into the public sphere of detective work and retaining, or regaining, the professional authority of the latter role despite the former. Forging a profession with elements of the detective, the scientist, the medium, and the occultist, they assert what the scientists of Chapter 3 learn—that scientific theories and methods, occult knowledge, and spiritual sensitivity must unite in order to understand and tackle the weird. The weird mysteries they deal with are natural, based in revised, secular empirics that extend into the more-than-visible world, while as professional detectives, weirdfinders bring occult knowing and methods from the hermetic margins to the public mainstream.

Flaxman Low’s Real Ghosts Written by Kate and Hesketh Prichard under the pseudonyms of E. and H. Heron, the Flaxman Low stories were first published in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898. There they were presented as “Real Ghost Stories” (possibly in an echo of W. T. Stead’s Real Ghost Stories [1891], which were to be considered authentic).48 The Introduction to the first story in Pearson’s explains that Low offered his “clear and ample” notes to the authors for turning into published stories.49 Part of this Introduction becomes, in the Preface to the 1899 book, a letter from Flaxman Low himself; either way, Low’s fictional status was at first unclear, with the authors, themselves under fictional identities, presented as “editors” given the task of preparing the stories for a public readership. It is a public good, it seems, to report occult phenomena responsibly. Therefore, the authors explain in the Introduction to “The Story of ‘The Spaniards’, Hammersmith,” With a view to meeting the widespread interest in these matters, the following series of ghost stories is laid before the public. They have been

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gathered out of a large number of supernatural experiences with which Mr. Flaxman Low – under the thin disguise of which name many are sure to recognise one of the leading scientists of the day, with whose works on Psychology and kindred subjects they are familiar – has been more or less connected.

Low is immediately established as already a well-known expert, called in to deal with the cases encountered by his clients and based, readers are encouraged to believe, on a “leading scientist” of the day (he even writes up cases for the SPR, and it’s certainly tempting to suspect Frederic Myers as a model). The authors position Low’s cases as part of the project of “reducing Psychology to the lines of an exact science,” alluding to the SPR’s work of identifying and classifying phenomena (“Spaniards,” 60). Having studied at Oxford, he has “devoted his life to the study of psychical phenomena” and cautions against injudicious dabbling.50 Weirdfinding is a serious business. The narrative construction of the story series itself is designed to perform Low’s expert knowledge. At the start of “The Story of Baelbrow,” the authors acknowledge choosing “the completer cases, those that ended in something like satisfactory proof, rather than the many instances where the thread broke off abruptly amongst surmisings, which it was never possible to subject to convincing tests.”51 The chosen cases present only Low’s untarnished professional success—only, as the references to “proof” and replicable “tests” imply, those cases where the scientific method worked. When in a later story Low asserts that “by drawing upon our experience of things we know and see, we should be able to form accurate hypotheses with regard to things which, while clearly pertaining to us, have so far been regarded as mysteries” (“Saddler’s Croft,” 184), everything we have read only proves him right. The authors’ reference to what has been omitted generates a spectral array of unsolved (or at least unproven to be solved) cases that lies behind the published stories. Literally fictitious and unwritten, their shadowy absent presence hints at the weird’s irreducibility, its resistance of scientific conventions and comprehensibility, even while the visible display is solely of Low’s professional expertise and the success of scientific reasoning. Low’s point of departure is psychology in the pre-Freudian vein of Frederic Myers and Henry Jekyll, as discussed in Chapter 2. In “The Story of Sevens Hall,” a vengeful ghost drives two brothers to suicide

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and Low saves the third. Low’s explanation of the haunting could have come straight out of “Multiplex Personality”: “Contemporary psychology has arrived at the conclusion that every man possesses a subconscious as well as a conscious self,” added Low, after a pause. “This second or submerged self appears to be infinitely more susceptible of spiritual influences than the conscious personality.”52

As we will see, Low takes his psychological investigations deep into the spiritual and the occult. Psychology, he tells us is unfortunately a science with a future but without a past, or more probably it is a lost science of the ancients. However that may be, we stand to-day on the frontier of an unknown world, and progress is the result of individual effort; each solution of difficult phenomena forms a step towards the solution of the next problem. (“Spaniards,” 63)

Low is someone prepared to push at the limits of scientific knowledge and even to draw on long-discarded unconventional methods to do it. The hauntings Low investigates usually connect, gothic fashion, to past misdeeds and ancient places; many causes are “otherworldly” and some are not, but they are never conventional ghosts.53 Many exhibit material solidity and turn out to be spirits or forces that have managed to bridge the gulf between the world of matter and the world of spirit—or show it to be one and the same. “The invisible is the real,” says Low of the haunting thing in “The Story of Baelbrow”; “the material only subserves its manifestation.” In this story, an “elemental psychic germ” connected to the ancient barrow upon which the house is built grows into a “helpless intelligence,” lingering until it is able to take possession of a mummy brought home by Low’s client (the sceptical Mr. Swaffam) and manifest itself as a vampire (“Baelbrow,” 374). There is nothing supernatural here—the ghost is a psychic intelligence, the mummy is simply material, and the vampire is something naturally “self-created” under the right conditions. Three traditionally supernatural revenants are demolished in one go; Low’s expert explanation constructs instead a weird phenomenon (inhuman, amoral, materialist, irrational but real), whose threat is easily neutralised by burning the mummy. Some of the phenomena, though, have no personal motivations against any individual or no particular link with a house. In “The Story of Moor

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Road,” the haunter is an “Elemental Earth Spirit,” which are things that “absorb the vitality of any ailing person until it is exhausted” and are “animated solely by a blind malignity to the human race.”54 Such elemental spirits sit closer to the weird notion of outer monstrosities, and similar explanations are offered in some of Blackwood’s tales, such as the Silence story “The Nemesis of Fire.” Low distances himself from the occultist account of these spirits, however. He refers to his “own researches” into the relationship between “atmospheric influences,” gases, and spiritual phenomena “generated when certain of the primary formations are newly exposed to the common air,” adding atmospheric chemistry to his repertoire of scientific knowledge (“Moor Road,” 256). In this way, Low “defines the supernatural in his reality.”55 Weird phenomena exist, as a natural part of this world. Low’s own personality helps make a weird construction of reality seem rational and acceptable. He is presented as a calm, unflappable presence, reassuring to his clients and called upon because he is “the sort of man one could rely on in almost any emergency” (“Spaniards,” 61). When Mr. Swaffam tries to goad him that “‘you don’t look sufficiently high-strung for one of your profession’[,] Mr Low merely bowed” (“Baelbrow,” 369). As Schaper puts it, he is a “seasoned ghostbuster whose confrontations with household haunts affirm his masculinity rather than feminizing him” and the stories demonstrate that “only a man in full command of himself can safely confront the supernatural.”56 Low is unafraid to confront weird phenomena, however horrible some of them certainly are. That is not to say he is never scared, but he has the willpower to keep control of himself. As the opening narration to “The Story of Saddler’s Croft” explains, “[e]xtremely few persons are sufficiently masters of themselves to permit of their calling in the vast unknown forces outside ordinary human knowledge for mere purposes of amusement” (176). Low’s work is no casual hobby, and he is no passive instrument; he is trained to deal masterfully with the unthinkable. As a professional, Low is distinguished to a significant degree from his often-hapless client. In “Saddler’s Croft,” an American woman with an interest in spiritualism, Mrs. Corcoran, is lured in her sleep to a temple in the garden haunted by the powerful spirit of a Greek man, Agapoulos, which takes physical form by possessing the body of a local gentleman, Sinclair. Flaxman Low is able to explain and disrupt these circumstances, persuading the Corcorans to move house and undertaking to close “what may be called the doors of life” in Sinclair’s spirit or psyche that had,

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when open, made him vulnerable (185). In the events of the story, Mrs. Corcoran and Sinclair take on the passive role of medium. Mrs. Corcoran enters trances in which she sings and sleepwalks, while Sinclair (as Low later explains): invited the control of a spirit, and, having no inherent powers of resistance, he became its slave. Agapoulos must have possessed extraordinary willforce; his soul actually dominated Sinclair’s. Thus not only the mental attributes of Sinclair but even his bodily appearance became modified to the likeness of the Greek. (185)

Sinclair, with no willpower of his own to speak of, is an instrumental body open to possession by a spirit control which acts through him and alters his physical appearance. Mrs. Corcoran has dabbled in some occult activities such as sleeping with moonlight on her face, and Sinclair is a British colonial whose health and will have been weakened by a harsh Ceylon climate. These circumstances do render them more vulnerable than usual, but Agapoulos’s power, his “extraordinary will-force,” is genuine. For when investigating the spell encountered around the temple, Low is almost caught in it himself: It was only by an immense effort of will that he was able to throw off the trance that was stealing over him, holding him prisoner – how nearly a willing prisoner he shudders to remember. But habits of self-control have been Low’s only shield in many a dangerous hour. (183)

Mastery over oneself is key to mastery of the occult. Low possesses a “will-force” equal to that of otherworldly spirits. Even his willpower, though, has its limits. Low is presented as an athletic, healthy type, a “Corinthian male figure” who “mirrors the image of Holmes as both a man of action and one capable of profound rational thought.”57 He needs all of it. His most difficult challenge, logically, takes place at the end of the series. It takes the form of a Dr. Kalmarkane, first introduced and left undefeated in “The Story of Crowsedge,” then tackled in the final story, “The Story of Flaxman Low.” Here, Kalmarkane boasts he has “grasped the supreme secret […] of the Mother-force of nature – cosmic ether! […] I have discovered how to control the primal force, for the human Will is above all.”58 The battle between these

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two masters takes place firstly on a psychic level, as Kalmarkane’s control of a “parasite intelligence” through his manipulation of “etheric energy” enables him to attack Low from a distance, and finally as a good oldfashioned duel with pistols somewhere on the French coast near Calais (Low is injured but manages to shoot his opponent dead) (586). Winning (if barely) these battles after a severe struggle with a particularly powerful combatant demonstrates Low’s manly superiority in the realm of action as well as his intellectual willpower and, the authors hope, “that high-mindedness which has always formed one of his most prominent characteristics” (587). In one of the earlier stories, Low comes close to losing his self-control almost entirely. In “The Story of Yand Manor House,” one of the most chilling of the collection and worthy of M. R. James in its depiction of an emphatically tactile and savoury ghost that can be tasted, felt, and leaves traces in the form of scraps of hair and fingernails, Low is almost crushed to death in his panic to escape a haunted room: Low pushed out his hands with a mad longing to touch a table, a chair, anything but this clammy, swelling softness that thrust itself upon him from every side, baffling him and filling his grasp. He knew now that he was absolutely alone – struggling against what? His feet were slipping in his wild efforts to feel the floor – the dank flesh was creeping upon his neck, his cheek – his breath came short and labouring as the pressure swung him gently to and fro, helpless, nauseated!59

For once Low is not only “baffled”—“struggling against what?”—but his self-control deserts him in favour of “mad longing” and “wild efforts” (he has a similarly described narrow brush with what turns out to be a plant, an unusual Malaysian creeper, in “The Story of the Grey House”). The “Yand Manor” phenomenon presents, for a time, as a weird entity, something incomprehensible and unknowable. It exhibits an illogical kind of immaterial solidity: the pressure of what he later calls “spiritualised matter” (590), a failed absence, a presence that is not a presence. Consequently upon the ontological distress this causes, Low’s knowledge and will both temporarily fail and he only escapes by chance, accidentally breaking a window and falling out into the garden.

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Fortunately, he is able to redeem himself. His direct experience of the phenomenon has allowed him to know it sufficiently to give his client Blackburton and his logician friend Thierry the explanation: the room is haunted by a deceased Blackburton ancestor, whose arcane activities sustained his spirit after death and preserved his body’s growth of hair and fingernails. When Blackburton asks “[b]ut why should Sir Gilbert haunt the Manor House, and one special room?” Low responds that “[t]he tendency of spirits to return to the old haunts of bodily life is almost universal. We cannot yet explain the reason of this attraction of environment” (590). The word “yet” indicates that it is only a matter of time before such secrets give themselves up. Thierry presses him on the mystery of the pressure in the room, and Low admits he can’t explain it “as fully as I could wish, perhaps. But the power of expanding and contracting to a degree far beyond our comprehension is a well-known attribute of spiritualised matter” (590). This episode is about the closest Low gets, in the stories his editors selected, to his explanatory limits. But as Thierry finally concedes in the lines that not only close the story but conclude that year’s six instalments, “[i]n time, my dear Monsieur Flaxman, you will add another to our sciences. You establish your facts too well for my peace of mind” (591). Bearing witness as a scientific sceptic, after all, is the purpose of Thierry’s presence in this tale; as Leslie-McCarthy points out, “a key part of creating [Low’s] new discipline is being able to promote its validity to a mainstream professional audience whose criteria for proof are typically established along more traditional scientific lines.”60 To this end, Low’s establishment of facts is not limited to convincing theoretical explication but includes empirical proof. The clues and proofs in some stories—a mummy’s foot shot by a pistol (“Baelbrow”), hair and a missing fingernail (“Yand Manor”)—present a clear trail, making these stories unsettling because rather than despite the materiality of these haunters. However, the demonstration of tangible empirical proof is deceptive and conceals an underlying weird instability. For example, in “Spaniards,” the evidence for the haunting of the house (by a leper murderer and suicide) ends up on public display: The skeleton is now in the museum of one of our city hospitals. It bears a scientific ticket, and is the only evidence extant of the correctness of Mr. Flaxman Low’s methods and the possible truth of his extraordinary theories. (69)

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Cook, drawing on Sarah Crofton, points out a gap in the logic here: that attributing the murderous ghost to this skeleton is inference, not the proof expected from a trail of clues readable by the detective, and still needing a leap of faith to believe in the weird.61 Cook argues, however, that the reliance on inference, the stories’ “partial compliance” with detective fiction conventions, and the “broken chain of clues” are significant: This balance between knowledge and supposition, while inhabiting its structures, offers an alternative universe to the prescribed detective narrative where knowledge always morphs into certainty. It challenges the reader to ponder: which of these alternatives describes the world in which I live?62

The gap between an intuitive leap and logical deduction makes a space for the weird, wherein exists another construction of the world, one only partially comprehensible or amenable to scientific truth claims—and that is the way it should be, leaving us on the limits of the known. The real-world evidence and “casebook” presentation of Low’s stories are narrative devices to bolster their authenticity, and through that the authenticity of his particular brand of psychical science. The stories work satisfyingly partly because the solution to the puzzle is not obvious— the haunting is never a traditional ghost but always an unexpected combination. Although Low can explain everything, the phenomenon first presents itself as an inexplicable weird encounter that seems to defy natural law but yet leaves empirical evidence. Low’s explanations arguably contain and neutralise weirdness, but in doing so, they also acknowledge that reality is not what we thought it was. The “standard of reality,” as an Algernon Blackwood character would later put it, has changed.63 The weird is real; a male scientist, occultist, professional detective says so, with unquestionable authority.

John Silence’s Powerful Sympathy In one of the happiest ghost stories I’ve ever read, Blackwood’s 1907 “The Woman’s Ghost Story,” a female psychical researcher is sent to investigate a house supposedly haunted by the ghost of a murdered woman.64 Instead, she encounters a mysterious caretaker, who turns out

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to be the real ghost (she had been lied to about the nature of the haunting). The encounter is at first terrifying, and she declares “I was an utter fool to go in for psychical research when I had not the necessary nerve.”65 What she does have, however, is the necessary sympathy to provide what the ghost wants to release him from his liminal state: love. Since he is “well dressed, youngish and good looking, but with a face of great sadness,” responding to the request isn’t all that difficult. Feelings of pity and love released by his demand sway her to kiss him in “a momentary ecstasy of flaming sweetness and wonder” (348), and the house is left empty. Here, the narrator’s feminine capacities of feeling are what enable her to identify and then exorcise the ghost, not her intellectual control. It is a “woman’s” ghost story in more ways than one—she tells her own story and solves her own case successfully within the domestic space of an ordinary house. It is a case particularly suited to her femininity, requiring emotion and sympathy rather than strong will and reasoning. In the end, she decides not to bother her uncle with the true story and thus avoids subjecting the situation to rational mansplaining. All in all, her method of dealing with the haunting is an almost exact inverse of that of Flaxman Low’s. The contrast fulfils Susan Schaper’s argument that when “female characters subdue household ghosts with their feminine compassion, they demonstrate the power of the domestic woman,” while “the ultimate source of cultural authority lay not in essential middle-class femininity but in essential masculine ‘animal instincts’ governed by rational self-discipline.”66 Blackwood’s own psychic doctor character, John Silence, however, has it all: the nerve and the sympathy, the intellect and the intuition. He is not quite such a man of action as Low, but combines sympathy and willpower to diagnose and assist his clients and, where necessary, to subdue weird phenomena. John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) was Blackwood’s first big success as a writer, enabling him the financial independence to move to Switzerland. The book published the first five stories. “A Psychical Invasion,” “The Nemesis of Fire,” and “The Camp of the Dog” all centre on a case investigated by Silence himself, while “Ancient Sorceries” and “Secret Worship,” according to Blackwood’s biographer Mike Ashley, were probably written earlier with Silence “grafted on to the story in a final revision.”67 A sixth story, “A Victim of Higher Space,” was added to the

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collection later.68 I focus mainly here on the first story, “A Psychical Invasion,” which outlines Silence’s background and the methods he uses in the six cases that unfold. Blackwood’s conception of the more-than-visible world was a realm not of (human) ghosts or souls but of far greater powers or energies. In “The Genesis of Ideas” (1937), Blackwood recalled that as a child he “longed to see a ghost” and later “to understand what faculty enabled one to see a ghost, or, rather, be aware of any ‘other-worldly’ manifestation at all.”69 He held that awareness of the expanded world was based in consciousness: “My interest lay then in the extension of human faculty, and in the possibility that the mind has powers which only manifest themselves occasionally. And this interest is even stronger in me today than ever.”70 Developing the mind’s faculties gives the practitioner capacity for agency in relation to the more-than-visible world, in contrast to the latent talents and passive, controllable sensitivity that might typically attend a spiritualist medium. Belief in these possibilities had scientific support, Blackwood explained: It leads into an enormous and tricky field, of course. The researches of modern psychology, studies of multiple personality, new conceptions of time and space, and the serious possibility that normal consciousness may experience strange extensions, give to the whole question now a semiscientific flavor.71

Ambivalent, however, about the place of science in this conception of reality, Blackwood had doubts about the adequacy of occultism as well— though he had sincere interests in both. Blackwood joined the Theosophical Society in New York in 1892, and the Golden Dawn in 1900, and Silence is understood to be based on a fellow Golden Dawn member.72 Like Machen, Blackwood left the Order after finding its teachings could not provide the answers he sought.73 S. T. Joshi notes a “systematic repudiation of occultism” in Blackwood’s work because he did not want his own philosophy of expanded awareness of the world to be confused with it.74 Nevertheless, Ashley records the way occult knowledge and Golden Dawn involvement “brought an authenticity to his stories” and shows that the Silence stories are all based on impressions Blackwood had himself received in various places.75 Occult

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concepts influence several of his novels; John Silence is one possible working out for Blackwood, through fiction, of what neither occult teachings nor science alone could provide.76 The weird is as real in Silence’s world as it is in Flaxman Low’s. He doesn’t deny the existence of strange phenomena, but he rejects both normal scientific and normal superstitious explanations; Cook remarks that, “in Blackwood’s stories, the question of the existence of the supernatural world is not in doubt.”77 However, the terminology is misleading. For Blackwood, Ashley makes clear, The “supernatural” was not something magical or unnatural, in the superstitious sense. Everything was “natural” but mankind could no longer see the whole. The world-view of mankind had become diminished, and thus the only way to see the whole was to step beyond the everyday world into the “super-natural.”78

Silence, in the same vein as Low, explains exactly this point in “Nemesis of Fire”: “I have yet to come across a problem that is not natural and has not a natural explanation. It’s merely a question of how much one knows – and admits.”79 Like other Blackwood characters such as Bittacy in “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” and O’Malley in The Centaur (1911), Silence has learned how to step beyond the everyday world and see the whole—and, unlike these others, how to do so safely and return unaltered. As he explains to his client in “A Psychical Invasion,” he has been “inoculated” (34) (unlike Bittacy, O’Malley, and Defago in “The Wendigo,” who are transformed). Silence is a unique model. His advanced skills and knowledges— including medicine, mathematics, anthropology, psychical research, and occultism—are moulded into a role suited to dealing with the weird more-than-visible world and legible in specifically Edwardian cultural contexts of masculinity, imperialism, and professional expertise. Mark De Cicco, in a discussion of Silence’s techniques, has argued that “Silence, while taking similar risks to our other occult scientists, manages to make use of occult science to harness queer, supernatural forces and to ultimately bring balance to a world that threatens to fall out of sync.”80 De Cicco’s elaboration of the “queer” to describe what is strange and different in the world compared to consensus normality works well as an expression of the weird, although he never calls it that. His term for figures like Silence is “occult explorer,” into which he co-opts, if not the

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most obvious choices for comparison, our old friends Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Raymond. The risks Silence takes may be similar in some ways to Jekyll’s, but they are not to Raymond’s: Raymond puts other people fatally at risk, never himself. While De Cicco is right about Silence’s role in making the world a better place by smoothing over weird irruptions (and leaving aside the point already made that queer or weird forces in Blackwood are not “supernatural”), Silence is more than an occult scientist. “A Psychical Invasion” emphasises Silence’s dislike of uncritical conceptions of science and of being associated with either mainstream medicine or with occultism. For example, he has “a clear knowledge of the difference between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychical affliction that claimed his special powers” (4). Such an affliction is both medical and in need of the help of something “special” and mysterious. The horrors encountered by Silence’s clients go beyond everyday maladies, yet are to be taken seriously, and so his abilities must go beyond familiar skills and knowledge. When his visitor in the opening scene attempts to praise his “sympathetic heart and knowledge of occultism” and he interrupts her with “please – that dreadful word!” she amends her phrasing to “your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your trained psychic knowledge” (1, italics original). A man of latent talents combined with training is how she sees him in more precise terms than the slippery catch-all “occultism.” Silence’s learning has taken him far beyond any of his contemporaries, beyond the Golden Dawn and beyond the Society for Psychical Research. He calls the SPR’s classificatory work “uninspired,” yet pities them because he’s too kind to show contempt: “For the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the ‘man who knows’” (“A Psychical Invasion,” 4). What is it, then, that Silence “knows”? His clients call him “the psychic doctor,” and the texts regularly identify him as “the doctor,” emphasising his role as a medical practitioner. In the framework of the story, psychical knowledge is evidently advanced enough that methods can be taught and doctors trained, just like any other science. No one, we are told, “ever dreamed of applying to him the easily acquired epithet of quack” (3–4). Silence has evidently succeeded in creating a convincing new medical field. Yet he has undergone rigorous training in the weird, too: “In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual” (3). His training has taken place at exactly the point where distinctions between these three ways of knowing collapse into one. At the same time,

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it remains beyond public ken: “What precisely this training had been or where undergone, no one seemed to know […] it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years” (3). The hermetic secrecy suggests an occult training like that offered by the Golden Dawn, and Graf describes Silence as “an exemplar of adepthood.”81 Members believed, Graf explains, “that the knowledge and experience gained by attaining the higher grades actually meant that the candidate was evolving spiritually and psychically.”82 If so, Silence has taken that evolution to a unique extreme; as far as we can tell, his training was not a shared activity, since he seems to be the only one of his kind. He is “the one man in all the world who can understand, and sympathize,” exclaims Mr. Mudge, the “Victim of Higher Space” (and a man who should know, since he travels multiple dimensions and has potentially been everywhere at once).83 Silence, certainly, has developed beyond the need for systematic, ritual practices; as he explains, Systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tea-leaves, are merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the inner vision may become open. Once the method is mastered, no system is necessary at all. (“A Psychical Invasion,” 5)

Although Silence knows how occult rituals and paraphernalia work, as he demonstrates by summoning the elemental in “Nemesis of Fire,” his primary resource is himself: his trained mind and body. The “keynote” of his power is in the knowledge, first, that thought can act at a distance, and, secondly, that thought is dynamic and can accomplish material results. “Learn how to think,” he would have expressed it, “and you have learned to tap power at its source.” (“A Psychical Invasion,” 5)

The simplicity of his skill separates Silence from both ritual occult practice and conventional scientific practice. For Silence, summarises Smajìc, “[i]mpressions received through the inner senses are more reliable than corporeal sensations, and one must be careful not to distort the former with deductive reasoning.”84 Silence’s superior abilities may be down to his training, but he also values intuition, and surrounds himself with servants and staff who possess it (including Hubbard in “The Nemesis of

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Fire” and “The Camp of the Dog,” and Barker in “A Victim of Higher Space”). Silence’s first visitor in “A Psychical Invasion” stresses the value of his “sympathetic heart” alongside his knowledge, and physical descriptions of Silence draw out his sympathy as well as his intellectual control. Two descriptions are worth quoting fairly fully. His eyes are “speaking” and in them shone the light of knowledge and self-confidence, while at the same time they made one think of that wondrous gentleness seen most often in the eyes of animals. A close beard concealed the mouth without disguising the grim determination of lips and jaw, and the face somehow conveyed an impression of transparency, almost of light, so delicately were the features refined away. […] from his manner, – so gentle, quiet, sympathetic, – few could have guessed the strength of purpose that burned within like a great flame. (“A Psychical Invasion,” 5)

In “Nemesis of Fire,” the narrator (Silence’s assistant Hubbard) remarks on The absolute control he possessed, not only over the outward expression of emotion by gesture, change of colour, light in the eyes, and so forth, but also, as I well knew, over its very birth in his heart, the mask-like face of the dead he could assume at will, made it extremely difficult to know at any given moment what was at work in his inner consciousness. (192–3)

Both descriptions combine the knowledge and control of the expert, the feminised delicacy and sympathy of the sensitive medium, and a masculine strength and determination. His personality is the epitome of Schaper’s “essential masculine ‘animal instincts’ governed by rational self-discipline” quoted earlier. The development of mental control and the power of the will is central to Silence’s successes, but so too is his capacity to sympathise with his clients’ suffering (which helps lead him to a better understanding of their case) and his ability to turn his own mind and body into a sensitive mediumistic instrument, as he does in “A Psychical Invasion.” In this case, Silence investigates why his client, a man named Pender, is being haunted by ancient evil forces emanating from his house and channelled through his body. Pender has no control over this; it is happening unluckily while he is under the influence of drugs. Silence describes Pender’s state as “a

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surprising psychical condition. Certain portions of your atmosphere are vibrating at a far greater rate than others” (15). The doctor’s diagnosis is simultaneously medical, psychical, and occult: hashish, he explains, “partially opened another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration, and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. Ancient forces attached to this house have attacked you” (23). Silence claims that forces lingering after a human death (in this case an eighteenth-century witch, “a woman of consummate wickedness and great personal power of character and intellect”) can “coalesce with certain non-human entities who thus continue their life indefinitely and increase their strength” (33). Unnameable abominable horrors have been “galvanised into active life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower magic” (70). Tackling a trained will takes a trained will, and Silence’s solution is to battle and exorcise these forces by deflecting the invasion from Pender to himself. At the climax of the battle, he confronts the weird monster made of the witch’s personality and the non-human entities, figured as “the wreck of a vast dark Countenance” with “the mark of spiritual evil […] branded everywhere upon its broken features” (63). Although he is confident he will not be “robbed” of self-control (64), there comes a point where he must choose to submit to the experience, to enter the mystic state if he is to know it fully. He starts to absorb into himself the forces opposed to him and to turn them to his own account. By ceasing to resist, and allowing the deadly stream to pour into him unopposed, he used the very power supplied by his adversary and thus enormously increased his own. (64)

Submission becomes agency, and Silence’s body becomes an instrument, a “purifying filter” through which the evil, unable to harm him because “his motive was pure and his soul fearless,” eventually, as I return to in Chapter 6, exhausts itself (64). As it weakens, he regains his agency: “with the return of the consciousness of his own identity John Silence was restored to the full control of his own will-power” (65). A causal effect is implied here that knowing oneself, essentially a question of personal, intuitive knowledge, is key to that all-important willpower, rather than the other way round. Silence’s success is not only down to his mental power and will, but to the state of his spirit; he is both instrument and operator, passive and active, able to master his own movement in and

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out of a mediumistic, mystic, or transcendent state, all in the name of good. Without his intervention, Pender’s psychical invasion would have remained either a psychological or a supernatural mystery. Silence’s understanding and explanation of the cause, combined with his intensely personal experiencing of the phenomenon itself, turn the case into a weird case. Silence’s efforts reassert mastery over an expanded notion of reality by engaging with it on its own (weird) terms. At the same time, this is a controlling, governing move—what De Cicco calls “an extension (or perhaps colonization) on the part of rational thought into non-normative space.”85 The impulse towards controlling the occult is legible as part of wider British nineteenth-century imperial culture, which “devise[d] unprecedented measures for controlling the physical world and the spatial expanses it occupied,” testing “the borders of supernatural as well as spatial and temporal distances.”86 It follows that the more-than-visible world is represented as a geographic place; in “A Psychical Invasion,” Silence speaks of a place “not far removed from the region of our human life […] a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of all descriptions” (70). In “A Victim of Higher Space,” the fourth dimension feels to Mudge as “a world of monsters.” He also experiences it as an irrational overlay of locations: “To be so confused in geography as to find myself one moment at the North Pole, and the next at Clapham Junction – or possibly at both places simultaneously – is absurdly terrifying.” Either way, remote and barbaric regions, whether terrestrial spaces or higher spaces, are brought uncomfortably close to the local (London) human world. John Silence, with his unique gifts and training, is better equipped than many to govern the unruly empire of the more-than-visible. Sarah Alexander, examining the construction of imperial spaces as a fourth dimension, argues that works such as Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) “reject notions of colonized space as two-dimensional and envision multiple, illegible dimensions, underscoring the limitations of empiricism to reveal the social and economic dimensions of empire.”87 Parlati notes the connection between Silence’s expertise and his role in policing the borders of empire: Silence is a powerful mixture of professional, rational expertise and esoteric knowledge, uniting Stoker’s Van Helsing with his Dr Seward. He is

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portrayed as a heroic, saint-like figure, on an errand to eradicate evil and push it beyond the borders of the British homeland.88

Silence, able to transcend the limits of conventional occult and scientific knowing, can deal with the frontiers of how reality is understood, but only up to a point. In the case of “Victim of Higher Space,” Silence cannot master the fourth dimension, admitting “I have made similar experiments myself, and only stopped just in time-.” All he can do is show Mudge how to “block the entrances,” and so reinforce the boundary between their three-dimensional reality and the monstrous world of the fourth. The more-than-visible world is either governed by knowledge, or secured as safely separate from human reality. One or other of these outcomes marks Silence’s engagement with weird realities in his other four cases, with which I will briefly connect. Three are set in lands beyond Britain, in Germany (“Secret Worship”), France (“Ancient Sorceries”), and Canada (“Camp of the Dog”), while in “Nemesis of Fire,” the menace is caused by the theft of a sacred green jasper scarabæus from an Egyptian mummy. Silence’s cases lead him to try a variety of strategies, and he does not always have it his own way. Limits are recognised and not all evils are eradicated—nor are they even all “evil.” The cult in “Secret Worship” is merely dispersed. In “Camp of the Dog,” Sangree’s lycanthropic double is not exorcised but becomes part of the harmonious self who unites with his lover Joan. Neither the mummy nor the fire elemental of “Nemesis of Fire” are destroyed; instead, it is the thief, the elderly Miss. Wragge, who is killed. In “Ancient Sorceries,” the client, who appears to tangle with a Satanic cult in a French town, is afflicted by “subliminal up-rushes” of the “intense activities of a past life,” and Silence can’t fix it; he is left with “an expression of profound yearning upon his face, the yearning of a soul whose desire to help is sometimes greater than his power.”89 In all cases, Silence’s intuition and expertise combine to allow him to tackle weird mysteries. He recognises an expanded version of reality in which matter and spirit need to be understood and treated as one. Any single identity or form of knowledge is insufficient, and from the available array, he creates a new professional role as a weirdfinder that secures boundaries of expertise, masculinity, and nation against the myriad of weird threats that menace the fin de siècle.

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Thomas Carnacki’s Occult Inventions William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki story series is, like Low’s, structured as a casebook, but instead of being prepared for the public, Carnacki’s cases are recounted by him to a select circle of friends who gather at his house for that sole purpose. In this sense, he is his own “editor,” and, like Low’s “editors,” his decisions about which cases to select and how to present them has implications for how far they can be taken as authentic proof of weird realities. The first five stories ran in 1910 in The Idler: “The Gateway of the Monster,” “The House Among the Laurels,” “The Whistling Room,” “The Horse of the Invisible,” and “The Searcher of the End House.” Together with a sixth story, “The Thing Invisible” (1912), the collection was published by Eveleigh Nash as a book titled Carnacki the Ghost-Finder in 1913. A review in The Bookman called the collection “half-a-dozen of the ‘creepiest’ experiences imaginable” and described the author as “a fascinating panic-monger with a quick eye for all the sensational possibilities of ghost-lore.”90 Later collections included a further three tales: “The Haunted Jarvee” (1929), “The Hog,” and “The Find” (both unpublished until 1947, when August Derleth included them in his collection also titled Carnacki the Ghost-Finder). Many of these mysteries do turn out to be weird phenomena, while others have more conventional explanations. Carnacki’s methods differ from those of Silence and Low. His tools are the occult and magical knowledge acquired from extensive esoteric research, updated with modern scientific theory and technology. In cases “where Silence would arrive with no equipment but his knowledge, Carnacki brings a trunk of modern instruments”91 ; these include his “Electric Pentacle” and a modified camera and gramophone. Carnacki shares with Silence and Low the expanded conception of “natural” reality that encompasses the weird. “The Hog,” for example, contains a detailed explanation by Carnacki of some of his notions of how the world is, which includes the way the planet is surrounded by an “Outer Circle,” something both physical and psychical. Human beings, too, commingle both; Carnacki possesses “physical magnetic and psychic ‘haloes’” (188).92 The stories also use the technique Roger Luckhurst calls “pseudobiblia,” in which a fabricated textual abhistory creates a foundation of knowledge with which to bolster the weirdfinder’s reasoning.93 In this section, I

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explore the way Carnacki’s worldview, his marshalling of invented knowledge, and his uses of technologised occult methods work together to form the weirdfinding framework in this series of stories. Carnacki’s weird monsters are notable throughout the series for the way that they take material form. In the first story, “The Gateway of the Monster,” Carnacki is called to investigate a haunting whose physical evidence includes the slamming of a bedroom door and the nightly hurling of bedclothes into a corner—the actions of “a monstrous hand.”94 Ghostly hands in literature, Jenny Bann has argued, are a particularly strong (and numerous) literary indicator of the changing nature of spectres in the nineteenth century, “from the powerless hand-wringing of [Dickens’s] Marley’s ghost to the controlling, guiding, or demonstrative hands” of later fiction, which she links to spiritualism and the increasingly material manifestation of spirits in the séance.95 In particular, Bann notes the new forms of agency and empowerment that spiritualism lent to imaginings of ghosts. While embodied spirits in the séance might be benign, entertaining, communicative, and affectionate, occultism also understood a greater range of forces and entities dwelling in other planes than the remains of human souls alone. Carnacki’s weird Hand is of the latter set. Spending a night in the room within the protection of his Electric Pentacle, Carnacki at first observes “a moving shadow, a little darker than the surrounding shadows”; then, he hears “the slow, dragging slither of the [bed]clothes; but [he] could see nothing of the thing that pulled” (49). Finally, a flashlight reveals the giant Hand, groping at the edge of the Pentacle: “the ghastly thing went round and round, grabbing and grabbing in the air at me” (50). What begins as an intangible “ghost” eluding observation resolves into something solid and corporeal enough to be visible in light and capable of agency over both matter (the sheets) and occult or psychic force (the Hand responds to the power of the Pentacle and affects Carnacki’s mind in its efforts to break through). In Carnacki’s first case, as in many of his others, material and immaterial forces combine to make and embody the weird monster. A similar embodiment happens in “The Whistling Room,” in which the rotten soul of a dead jester manifests itself as “a pair of gargantuan lips, black and utterly monstrous” (84) by warping the materials of the building around it; tongueless in life, the whistling of the lips represents the monster’s best form of agency. In “Gateway of the Monster,” the monstrous Hand is part traditional superstition, part materialised ghost, and part occult force. Searching the room in the light of day, Carnacki

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finds a pentagon-shaped ring, which he recognises as one connected with a sinister legend of his client’s family. Keeping the ring with him the next night, in the hope of neutralising it, Carnacki discovers he has unwittingly brought the “gateway” inside the Electric Pentacle, where the monster starts to manifest: The convoluting shadows about the ring were taking shape […] the brute was coming through – pouring into the material world, as gas might pour out from the mouth of a pipe. […] I saw that it was the Hand, vast and nearly perfect in form. (53)

The presence of the ring inside the Pentacle turns the protective circle into a place of danger. Carnacki’s own action has enabled the monster to subvert the weirdfinder’s most powerful defence, in a “distortion of that occult staple, the magic circle, such that it becomes both technological and a portal, enabling the irruption of the weird,” undermining any sense of firm borders between self and other, this world and that.96 Accordingly, the positions of Carnacki and the Hand are inverted. The weirdfinder escapes by leaping out over the Electric Pentacle, leaving the monster “chained, as surely as any beast would be” (53). He has contained the menace, but not exactly defeated it. Only in the safety of the morning can he end its existence as well by destroying the ring itself. Appropriately for their ambiguous nature and disregard for ontological borders, Carnacki’s monsters must be tackled on both a material and psychical level and require the weirdfinder to draw on a blend of different sets of knowledge. The giant lips and the ghostly hand may partly function as spiritualist manifestations, but they are also occult forces; Luckhurst argues that “Carnacki’s protective pentacle, his conjuring of malicious forces, and his references to the authority of medieval manuscripts owe more to the rites associated with the Order of the Golden Dawn than psychical research.”97 The Golden Dawn, based on knowledge derived from supposed translations of ancient manuscripts and ciphers, required initiates to learn esoteric texts and ritual practice in detail, often with the goal of incarnating spiritual powers. “Golden Dawn magic,” Graf describes, “worked through the embodiment of cosmic energy in talismans and symbols,” and R. A. Gilbert gives the examples of the “Rituals of the Pentagram and Hexagram, for the invocation and banishment of assorted spirits.”98 In Theosophy, too, symbols such as circles, crosses, and the five-pointed

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star used in ceremonial magic each had their own significance.99 In the early twentieth century, Egil Asprem details, Aleister Crowley worked particularly hard at framing the occult scientifically, publishing scientific test methods for magic in The Equinox between 1909 and 1917, and devising a dedicated system for the naturalistic proof of visions, spirit communications, and other occult phenomena.100 Carnacki’s Pentacle and associated rituals reflect these practices. Carnacki, following in the footsteps of his weirdfinder, doctor, and detective predecessors, is presented as a professional too much respected to function as a Crowley figure exactly. Nevertheless, he is a modern occult scientist, who both admits his faith in the “old magic figure” of the pentacle and cites repeated tests and observations as his evidence. “I ask questions, and keep my eyes open,” he says, seeing himself as the “twentieth century man” of scientific approach who will not dismiss the evidence of his own experience (45). Yet it is questionable how seriously we are meant to take Carnacki, whose name alludes to an ancient Egyptian temple, Karnak, suggesting a level of artifice in even the diegetic construction of his identity.101 In “The Thing Invisible,” Carnacki explains that most people never quite know how much or how little they believe of matters ab-human or ab-normal, and generally they never have an opportunity to learn […] I am as big a sceptic concerning the truth of ghost tales as you are likely to meet; only I am what I might term an unprejudiced sceptic.102

He doesn’t dismiss anything out of hand, but he does, so he says, assume that the cause of a haunting is not a ghost until he’s convinced otherwise by the evidence. The story that follows, however, fails to bear out this claim, showing him convinced of the weird phenomenon before rather than after finding the evidence. The case involves a haunted chapel where a butler is mysteriously stabbed with a dagger. “There is no doubt at all,” Carnacki declares, “but that what I might term the Haunting Essence which lived in the place, had become suddenly dangerous” (16). He whets his listeners’ appetites further by elaborating his belief that it was “one of those extraordinarily rare ‘true manifestations’ of the extrusion of a Force from the Outside” (17). His own experience of the haunting then supports this hypothesis empirically. Alone in the chapel at night, he seems to feel “the dark about me press coldly against my face […] I had

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a horrible sense that something was moving in the place […] I had a kind of intuitive knowledge that something had stirred in the darkness” (22). Later still, he describes himself as “listening with body and soul” (25) and feeling the “sheer, actual physical pain attendant upon, and resulting from, the intense nerve strain that ghostly fright sets up in the human system” (26). In this way, Carnacki dresses up his tale in a scientised discourse drawing its authority from spiritualist experience, ghost story traditions, occult forces, and empirical sensory knowing, deliberately leading us to expect and accept the phenomenon as a “true manifestation.” “[N]inety-nine cases in a hundred,” Carnacki tells his unquestioning friends, “turn out to be sheer bosh and fancy. But the hundredth! Well, if it were not for the hundredth, I should have few stories to tell” (16). And yet the case he’s about to recount to them, it turns out, is one of the ninety-nine: the dagger in the chapel is propelled by a hidden mechanism. The ninetynine cases evidently can offer stories just as good as the hundredth, as well as shedding doubt on it. “The Thing Invisible” raises questions over what is meant be taken as real in Carnacki’s stories; his personal bodily and mental experience in the chapel clearly can have nothing to do with mysterious outside forces, but is almost identical to what he undergoes in the Grey Room in “Gateway of the Monster” which is really haunted. Or perhaps what is “real” is all in the telling. Compounding the uncertainty is the way Carnacki builds up his knowledge from (invented) occult sources—the study of esoteric rituals, ancient manuscripts, like the “Sigsand MS,” and obscure, implicitly recent works such as “Professor Garder’s “Experiments with a Medium” (“Gateway of the Monster,” 45) or “Harzan’s Monograph, and my Addenda to it, on Astral and Astral Co-ordination and Interference.”103 Sometimes his audience cite these back to him: Arkwright asks “have you any idea what governs the use of the Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual? I know, of course, that it was used by the Ab-human Priests in the Incantation of Raaaee” (“Whistling Room”, 86). Are these details wellknown facts in Arkwright’s wider world, are they secret, esoteric knowledge shared by this little circle of initiates and perhaps others—or does he but parrot it after spending so many evenings sitting in Carnacki’s dining room? Carnacki’s four friends (Arkwright, Dodgson, Jessop, and Taylor— they never vary) are entirely credulous. “What talks they were!” enthuses Dodgson; “Stories of all kinds and true in every word, yet full of weird and extraordinary incidents that held one silent and awed until he had

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finished.”104 Yet despite Carnacki’s naming of clients, friends, and plenty of circumstantial details, they have only his word for any of it. Carnacki rationalises the gargantuan lips in “Whistling Room” in terms that lay on the pseudoscientific occult explanation so thick it reads like parody; he “liken[s] it to a living spiritual fungus, which involves the very essence of the aether-fibre itself, and […] acquires an essential control over the ‘material-substance’ involved in it” (86). He also refers to his own experience and reminds his listeners of other intriguingly titled incidents in another form of pseudobiblia since these cases, like Low’s others, have no existence outwith the story series itself. It’s hard not to suspect Hodgson of having fun with titles like the “Moving Fur case,” and “Nodding Door business,” since he never needed to invent a story to accompany them. Similarly, I find myself how wondering far the “Unknown Last Line of the Saaamaaa Ritual,” referred to in more than one case, is even intended to be a convincing invention. Firstly, despite being “Unknown,” it is nonetheless used and spoken (though not revealed); secondly, the linguistic peculiarity of the syllables in “Saaamaaa” defamiliarises and disconnects it further from a persuasive diegetic reality; and, thirdly, the term “Ab-human” used by Arkwright is a unique Hodgsonism that links the Carnacki world to the weird future of The Night Land and thus to a world of fictions.105 The Carnacki series’ construction resists the kind of external corroboration that accompanies the public-serving presentation of the Flaxman Low stories. Nevertheless, the Carnacki storyworld has its own internal coherence, that of an uncertain, ambiguous reality and doubtful distinctions between the “true,” “weird,” and “extraordinary.” In one case, however, supporting empirical evidence is presented: in “The Horse of the Invisible,” Carnacki’s visitors arrive to find him displaying bandaged injuries, and he produces a set of photographs which Dodgson is invited to peruse. If the internal truth claims of Carnacki’s cases are accepted, then one distinctive feature of them is his use of occult technologies that actually work. Carnacki uses audio recording equipment and a camera capable of performing the “Lightless Photography” he has developed from “X ray work,” which he implies was merely a starting point (“Thing Invisible,” 29). Hodgson was a keen photographer and combines his practical knowledge with the possibilities suggested by X-rays, at the time a relatively new discovery that had garnered much public interest.106 Cameras as a way of seeing without eyes, photographs as sources of evidence (whether of

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criminal activity or spirit manifestation, for example), and debates over photography’s reliability have been much discussed, including in relation to the Carnacki stories where they augment his physical and mental “eyes.”107 I want to end, however, with a discussion of the Electric Pentacle. The practical applications of electricity and magnetism as well as the theories had long been used to explain and even measure phenomena like spiritual and telepathic communication.108 In the 1870s, William Crookes designed and used several pieces of apparatus to measure what he termed the “Psychic Force,” including delicate balances, instruments for registering vibrations, and an electrified cage.109 The Electric Pentacle updates such technology at the same time as reviving ancient symbolism to become “a hybrid of magic and science,” a “layering of the traditional pentacle with its vacuum tube, steampunk cousin.”110 Amelia Carolina Sparavigna discusses the contemporary science that would lie behind such a device, arguing for Hodgson’s awareness of turn-of-the-century experiments involving “glowing discharges in low-pressure gases”; the Electric Pentacle can be imagined as a “neon luminous tube sign, containing neon or other inert gases at a low pressure.”111 Overlaying the pentacle symbol drawn on the floor, it is made of “intertwining vacuum tubes,” powered by a battery, that give off a “pale blue glare” (“Gateway of the Monster,” 46). Carnacki assures us that the drawn pentacle itself is not enough, citing the dangerous experiences of previous cases that led him to try out his augmentations. In “The Hog,” Carnacki uses a set of defensive rings according to the colour spectrum; of these, the “blue circle seemed to vibrate strangely as if minute particles of something were impinging on it in countless millions” (178). The Electric Pentacle operates, as “Gateway of the Monster” and “The Hog” show, in the same way as the weird monsters, using both physical processes and symbolic occult power. In “Gateway,” the five-pointed star is drawn within a circle made with chalk, garlic, and “a certain water,” among other things (45). Yet, in “The Hog,” the Electric Pentacle entirely inverts its protective purpose, turning into a deep black pit that channels the monstrous Hog’s incursion.112 The value of the evidence of any instrument’s measurement depends on its calibration—its suitability for measuring the phenomenon in question:

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Instruments’ credit is built up by suggesting that their structure matches that of the nature to be investigated. Ontologies support practices when users indicate that some artifice is a good model of a natural system; practices support ontologies when it is argued that this artifice gives reliable information about that system.113

This reasoning can be considered in relation to weird phenomena. In the case of a medium or psychic, their internal apparatus of spiritual sensitivity is aligned with the nature of phenomena they investigate, while weirdfinders like Silence are particularly highly calibrated. In Carnacki’s case, the Electric Pentacle is a model for the nature of reality in these stories—their ontology of commingled physical and psychic planes through which spirit can manifest in matter. In “Gateway of the Monster,” for example, the Pentacle confirms the nature of the monster by the way the Hand interacts with it, first testing it and then trapped by it. In “The Hog,” the Pentacle is too finely calibrated and even exacerbates the weird incursion. As an instrument, the Electric Pentacle reveals the weird’s existence in “the between.”114 It gives more reliable information about weird hauntings than, as in “The Thing Invisible,” does Carnacki himself. The weird is real: modern technology says so.

Conclusion Whether detected by an instrument or experienced by a body, weird phenomena in these tales are demonstrably real. The mysteries often look familiar at first, but under the weirdfinders’ explanations, hauntings are revealed to operate in unconventional combinations (of mind, body, and spirit, or mummy and vampire). Their investigation is required to make the haunting reveal itself as a weird phenomenon. Weirdfinders are “men who know”; they understand the possibilities of other realms of existence and their combined physical and psychical knowledge proves there is no divide between the spiritual and material worlds. Carnacki may use technological devices as well, but all three weirdfinders involve their own persons in their investigations: they go to experience the phenomena for themselves in order to know it. In their persons, they are both active agents and sensitive systems. Rather than being passive instruments requiring expert control, they retain their own agencies, calibrating their bodies and maintaining their power of will.

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Between them, these weirdfinding stories stage both the success and the failure of positivist science to explain and contain the phenomena of the universe, and attempt to align borderland science with the mainstream, turning what they do into a respectable and successful profession. All the same, the weirdfinders are often severely menaced by weird phenomena and may escape rather than defeat them. In some ways, weirdfinding brings these characters closer to the limits of human knowing than any other practice—and allows them to return to tell the tale.

Notes 1. Others include E. W. Hornung’s Dr. John Dollar in The Crime Doctor (1914) and Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer (1914) by Alice and Claude Askew; see Sage Leslie-McCarthy, “The Case of the Psychic Detective: Progress, Professionalisation and the Occult in Psychic Detective Fiction from the 1880s to the 1920s” (diss., Griffith University, 2007). 2. E. and H. Heron, Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist, Collected Stories (Project Gutenberg of Australia, 2006). 3. Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Mark De Cicco, “‘More Than Human’: The Queer Occult Explorer of the Fin de Siècle,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23, no. 1 (2012); Marilena Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues: Tales of Detection in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction,” European Journal of English Studies 15, no. 3 (2011). 4. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Fiction (New York: Dover, 1973), 75. 5. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 75; S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), 115. 6. Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 187. 7. Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber, 1977), 59. 8. Briggs, Night Visitors, 59–60. 9. Briggs, Night Visitors, 59. For discussion of Bulwer-Lytton’s A Strange Story and “The Haunters and the Haunted” as tales of scientific investigation of the marvellous, see Mark Knight, “‘The Haunted and the Haunters’: Bulwer Lytton’s Philosophical Ghost Story,” NineteenthCentury Contexts 28, no. 3 (2006).

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10. Mike Ashley, Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (London: Constable, 2001), 135. 11. Michael Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 16. 12. Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Fontana, 1991), 362, 360. 13. William Barrett, “Appendix to Report on Thought Reading,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 1 (1882), 62. 14. Frederic W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1903), 4, italics original. 15. Luckhurst, Telepathy, 189–90. 16. J. M. Gully, “Some Experiences and Conclusions Regarding Spiritualism, No. V,” The Spiritualist 3, no. 14 (1873), 211; see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850– 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 165. 17. Joan Gordon and China Miéville, “Revelling in Genre: An Interview with China Miéville,” Science Fiction Studies (2003), 368. 18. Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists; Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 2. 19. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 14. 20. Hilary Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic: Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 39. 21. Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, 187. 22. The word “scientist” is credited to William Whewell. On the creation of new professional labels, see David Cahan, “Looking at NineteenthCentury Science: An Introduction,” in From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2003); on professionalisation of scientists, see Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006). 23. Oppenheim, Other World, 202. 24. See Alex Owen, “The Sorcerer and His Apprentice: Aleister Crowley and the Magical Exploration of Edwardian Subjectivity,” Journal of British Studies 36, no. 1 (1997); Egil Asprem, “Magic Naturalized? Negotiating Science and Occult Experience in Aleister Crowley’s Scientific Illuminism La Magie ‘Naturalisée’? De La Négociation Entre Science Et Expérience Occulte Dans L’Illuminisme Scientifique D’Aleister Crowley,” Aries 8, no. 2 (2008). 25. Algernon Blackwood, “A Psychical Invasion,” in John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 1. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text.

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26. Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines, 173. 27. William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (London: J. Burns, 1874), 5. 28. W. F. Barrett et al., “Report of the Literary Committee,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 1 (1882), 150. 29. K. and Hesketh Prichard, Ghosts, Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1899), 193. 30. Anne Stiles, “Literature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 2 (2009), 319, 323. 31. Stiles, “Literature in Mind,” 332. 32. Joachim Schummer, “Historical Roots of the ‘Mad Scientist’: Chemists in Nineteenth-Century Literature,” Ambix 53, no. 2 (2006), 126. 33. Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues,” 214. 34. Joanna Wargen, “Subjugated Scientific Knowledges: Detecting the Victorian Female Scientist” (diss., University of Westminster, 2013). 35. See Jill Nicole Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). On bodies both “feminized” and “galvanized” in 1860s sensation fiction, see Nick Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1869–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42. 36. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 13. 37. [Anon.], “The Protection of Media,” The Spiritualist 3, no. 8 [1873]. 38. Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 39. Grimes, The Late Victorian Gothic, 87. On gothic and ghost story writing as a means of expression of women’s experience in the late nineteenth century, see also Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: W. H. Allen, 1977); Emma Liggins, “Gendering the Spectral Encounter at the Fin de Siècle: Unspeakability in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Stories,” Gothic Studies 15, no. 2 (2013). 40. Susan Schaper, “Victorian Ghostbusting: Gendered Authority in the Middle-Class Home,” Victorian Newsletters 100 (2001), 8. 41. Schaper, “Victorian Ghostbusting,” 11. 42. Wargen, “Subjugated Scientific Knowledges.” 43. Smith, Victorian Demons. 44. Leslie-McCarthy, “The Case of the Psychic Detective,” 167. 45. Susan Johnston Graf, Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015), 10, 11.

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46. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 88. 47. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 88. Annie Besant succeeded Blavatsky as Theosophy president, for example, and Florence Farr rose through the Golden Dawn’s senior ranks to become Praemonstrator after William Wescott; see R. A. Gilbert, Revelations of the Golden Dawn: The Rise and Fall of a Magical Order (Slough: Quantum, 1997), 140–48. 48. W. T. Stead, Real Ghost Stories: A Record of Authentic Apparitions (London, 1891); For an overview of the Flaxman Low stories, see Neil Wilson, Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction, 1820– 1950 (British Library, 2000). 49. E. and H. Heron, “No. I—The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith,” Pearson’s Magazine 5 (1898), 60. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 50. E. and H. Heron, “Second Series, No. II—The Story of Saddler’s Croft,” Pearson’s Magazine 7 (1899), 176. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 51. E. and H. Heron, “No. IV—The Story of Baelbrow,” Pearson’s Magazine 5 (1898), 366. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 52. E. and H. Heron, “Second Series, No. I—The Story of Sevens Hall,” Pearson’s Magazine 7 (1899), 37. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 53. Robert Perret, “Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist,” in Victorian Detectives in Contemporary Culture (Springer, 2017), 78. 54. E. and H. Heron, “No. III—The Story of the Moor Road,” Pearson’s Magazine 5 (1898), 255–56. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 55. Robert Perret, “Flaxman Low, Occult Psychologist,” 83. 56. Schaper, “Victorian Ghostbusting,” 10–11. 57. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 16. 58. E. and H. Heron, “Second Series, No. VI—The Story of Mr. Flaxman Low,” Pearson’s Magazine 7 (1899), 585. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 59. E. and H. Heron, “No. VI—The Story of Yand Manor House,” Pearson’s Magazine 5 (1898), 587. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 60. Leslie-McCarthy, “The Case of the Psychic Detective,” 169. 61. See Sarah Crofton, “Csψ: Occult Detectives of the Fin de Siècle and the Interpretation of Evidence,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 30, no. 2 (2012), 36. 62. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 20.

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63. Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” in The Listener and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 153. 64. Joshi, indeed, describes Blackwood as “quite frankly the most wholesome and cheerful horror writer I know of” (Weird Tale, 89). 65. Algernon Blackwood, “The Woman’s Ghost Story,” in The Listener and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 341. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 66. Schaper, “Victorian Ghostbusting,” 12. 67. For discussion of the production and impact of the book, see Ashley, Starlight Man, 131. 68. Algernon Blackwood, “A Victim of Higher Space” (1914), no pages, accessed 29 August 2018, http://www.luminist.org/archives/ blackwood_victim.htm. 69. Algernon Blackwood, “The Genesis of Ideas” (1937), reprinted in Studies in Weird Fiction 27 (2005), 35. 70. Blackwood, “Genesis of Ideas,” 3. 71. Blackwood, “Genesis of Ideas,” 3. 72. For discussion of this possibility see Ashley, Starlight Man; Graf, Talking to the Gods, 83. 73. For a detailed study of Machen, Blackwood, and the Golden Dawn, see Graf, Talking to the Gods. 74. Joshi, Weird Tale, 116. 75. Ashley, Starlight Man, 135. 76. See Graf, Talking to the Gods, 85–98 for discussion of The Human Chord, The Promise of Air, Bright Messenger, Julius Le Vallon, and The Centaur in the context of the Golden Dawn. See also this book, Chapter 6. 77. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, 21. 78. Ashley, Starlight Man, 53. 79. Algernon Blackwood, “The Nemesis of Fire,” in John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 173. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 80. De Cicco, “More Than Human,” 18. 81. Graf, Talking to the Gods, 14. 82. Graf, Talking to the Gods, 9. 83. Blackwood, “A Victim of Higher Space.” 84. Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, 191. 85. De Cicco, “More Than Human,” 21. 86. Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues,” 212. 87. Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015), 16. 88. Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues,” 214.

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89. Algernon Blackwood, “Ancient Sorceries,” in John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 139–40. 90. Anon., “Novel Notes,” The Bookman 47 (1913). 91. Briggs, Night Visitors, 64. 92. William Hope Hodgson, “The Hog,” in The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder (London: Wordsworth, 2006), 188. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 93. Roger Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/orientation,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017), 1048. 94. William Hope Hodgson, “The Gateway of the Monster,” in The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder (London: Wordsworth, 2006), 45. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. The order in which the stories were published in The Idler is not the order in which they appear in book collections; see Sam Gafford, “Carnacki Order” (2012), accessed 29 August 2018, https:// williamhopehodgson.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/carnacki-order/. 95. Jennifer Bann, “Ghostly Hands and Ghostly Agency: The Changing Figure of the Nineteenth-Century Specter,” Victorian Studies 51, no. 4 (2009), 664. 96. Timothy Jarvis, “The Weird, the Posthuman, and the Abjected World-inItself: Fidelity to the ‘Lovecraft Event’ in the Work of Caitlín R. Kiernan and Laird Barron,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017), 1140. 97. Luckhurst, Telepathy, 189. 98. Graf, Talking to the Gods, 11; Gilbert, Revelations of the Golden Dawn, 68. 99. H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, Vol. 1 (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888), 5–6. 100. Asprem, “Magic Naturalized?” 101. See, for example, World Monuments Fund, “Karnak Temple” (2017), accessed 19 August 2018, https://www.wmf.org/project/karnaktemple. 102. William Hope Hodgson, “The Thing Invisible,” in The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder (London: Wordsworth, 2006), 17. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 103. William Hope Hodgson, “The Whistling Room,” in The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder (London: Wordsworth, 2006), 86. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 104. William Hope Hodgson, “The Haunted ‘Jarvee’,” in The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder (London: Wordsworth, 2006), 132.

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105. See Kelly Hurley, “The Modernist Abominations of William Hope Hodgson,” in Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) on The Night Land, abhumans, and also Hodgson’s playful tendencies. See also Leigh Blackmore, “Things Invisible: Human and Ab-Human in Two of Hodgson’s Carnacki Stories,” Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies 1, no. 1 (2013). 106. Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, “Physics in Carnacki’s Investigations: The Role of New Scientific Discoveries in Literature,” IJLA 1, no. 1 (2013). On X-rays at the fin de siècle, see, e.g. Will Tattersdill, Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 94–131. On Hodgson’s photography, see Jane Frank, The Wandering Soul: Glimpses of a Life: A Compendium of Rare and Unpublished Works (Hornsea; Leyburn: PS; Tartarus, 2005). 107. William Fletcher Barrett, “Seeing Without Eyes,” in Spiritualism, Mesmerism and the Occult, 1800–1920, Vol. 4, Telepathy and the Society for Psychical Research, ed. Shane McCorristine (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012); Kathryn Miele, “Representing Empathy: Speaking for Vulnerable Bodies in Victorian Medicine and Culture” (diss., University of Warwick, 2007), 10; Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists; and Parlati, “Ghostly Traces, Occult Clues.” 108. Sconce, Haunted Media; Luckhurst, Telepathy; Egil Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror of Late Classical Physics,” Aries 11, no. 2 (2011), 146. 109. William Crookes, “Some Further Experiments on Psychic Force, 1871,” in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (Manchester: Two Worlds Publishing Company, 1926); see also Richard Noakes, “Instruments to Lay Hold of Spirits,” in Bodies/Machines, ed. Iwan Rhys Morus (Oxford: Berg, 2002). 110. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 71. 111. Sparavigna, “Physics in Carnacki’s Investigations,” 13. 112. Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, 71. 113. Simon Schaffer, “Self Evidence,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (1992), 334. 114. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016).

PART II

Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter

CHAPTER 5

Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells

The three stories discussed here—H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (1907) and “The Derelict” (1912)—use weird strategies to explore the implications for humans of sharing an entirely physical, embodied existence with other organisms. They treat premises drawn from the extremes of biological possibility as material realities at the centre of their narratives. The stories take place in liminal locations, borderland spaces in which both marginal and mainstream scientific principles can be reconsidered and reconstructed. These tales test the capacity of known science to explain the world, in an attempt to reconcile it with a conviction that wonder and terror can still infuse a material universe. Instead of the notion of matter expanding to include the unseen and unknown, as it does in the fictions examined in previous chapters, here concepts of agency, consciousness, and the place of weird others in the terrestrial world are rooted in the physical and organic: in the plasticity of meat and mould. So far, this book has examined weird fictions engaging with those most obviously “Borderland” of nineteenth-century sciences: occultism, psychical research, and their relations with mainstream scientific discourses and methods. The Island of Doctor Moreau is more likely to be called a gothic novel or a satire than classified as weird, but it has affinities with contemporaries such as The Great God Pan, not least in their shared debt to

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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.1 Doctor Moreau is also important to the development of the weird tale because of the way it incubates previously unimagined creatures, which are made possible through the narrative’s direct engagement with nineteenth-century biological science yet elude secure knowing. Biology, too, had its borderlands—weird areas of speculation and unanswered questions stimulated by scientists’ investigations into the appearance, workings, taxonomies, and evolutions of plants, animals, and those species that seemed to be both and neither. The particular appeal of biological borderlands to weird fiction is their capacity to authenticate the existence of strange new bodily forms. Weird creatures are explorations of the organic basis of life, problematising traditional assumptions about the nature of life and about the relationships between different types of organism.

Biological Borderlands and Where to Find Them Out on the ocean, an old wooden hulk, with the characteristic extravagance of Hodgson’s weird tales, metamorphoses into a voracious, living, ship-shaped monster. As one critic has seen it, “The Derelict” is “an attempt fully to realize the horrific potentialities of an utterly material universe, to theorize such concepts as life, volition, and consciousness in materialist terms.”2 Kelly Hurley’s remarks here suggest the position of the story’s premise on an ontological boundary; in this sense, the tale debates the relative significance of the material and the spiritual to a modern fin-de-siècle construction of the nature of organic life. While she is specifically discussing “The Derelict,” however, Hurley’s comments could equally apply to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), whose experimental vivisector tests the limits of the bodily basis of rational thought in his attempts to create humans out of animals and discover “the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape.”3 All three stories in this chapter use marine settings to open up spaces in which borderland scientific ideas can be explored as realities. The ships, islands, and oceans of Wells’s and Hodgson’s tales, adrift from the security and containment of maps, nations and continents, are heterotopic; they are spaces outside or apart from the spaces of their dominant culture, in the sense used by Michel Foucault in his 1967 essay “Des Espace Autres” (“Of Other Spaces”). Foucault’s heterotopia is a “counter-site,” meaning a place in which “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places

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of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.”4 Moreau’s island, for example, is legible in these terms. It is simultaneously a place and outside of all places, overturning the structures and assumptions of the culture from which he is exiled. The novel’s preface, written by Prendick’s nephew, frames the narrative with careful ambiguity, making the island into “a liminal space at the border between fiction and reality,” existing simultaneously within and beyond the confines of current marine cartography.5 The date and coordinates of Prendick’s rescue are precisely reported, a possible island (Noble’s Isle) is suggested as the location of Moreau’s laboratory, and the existence of the Ipecacuanha and its cargo is confirmed. Payal Taneja makes the valuable point that although Moreau “isolates himself culturally and intellectually from the scientists in London, he maintains an economic connection” with the British Empire and its trade network which supplies his animals.6 Neither island nor story are entirely divorced from social and geographic realities, but exist on their fringes. Despite these circumstances, however, empirical evidence is missing; no creatures resembling Beast People are found on the island to support Prendick’s story. The bottom line is, as Prendick’s nephew puts it, simply that “my uncle passed out of human knowledge […] and reappeared in the same part of the ocean after a space of eleven months” (2). Prendick’s story is received as “demented” (1), and, afterwards, he claims memory loss, undermining the sense of veracity the Preface at first appears to construct. Hodgson’s sea stories use islands and ships in similar ways. For Foucault, a ship is a “heterotopia par excellence […] a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.”7 Ships at sea exist between known places, and Hodgson’s and Wells’s ships and dinghies convey their protagonists into liminal spaces. In “The Derelict,” a storm drives the ship whose crew discovers the metamorphosed hulk into an unknown area of the ocean; the story takes place off the known charts and the discovery could never, except by another chance encounter, be verified. In “The Voice in the Night,” an unidentified island is the space in which two castaways encounter a tempting monstrous fungus. Fog conceals the fungus-man castaway and his rowing boat from the shipboard narrator and his companions, sustaining the story’s suspense and ambiguity. Hodgson’s choice of fungus as his material for monster manufacture, as we will see, has its own particular liminality.

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As well as being heterotopic in geographic and narrative terms, these ships, boats, and islands are also spaces in which scientific theories, principles, and practices, including in their extreme or most contested forms, can be reconsidered and reinvented. Moreau’s endeavours to find the limits of bodily plasticity are conducted within two late nineteenth-century scientific borderlands: the margins of the controversial practice of vivisection and the unresolved debates over mechanisms of evolutionary inheritance. Hodgson’s two short stories play in other biological borderlands, recombining discarded theories of spontaneous generation and early cryptogamy with fin-de-siècle speculations about the classification of different organisms, the relationships between them, and their evolutionary potential. All three stories theorise science strangely, generating weird encounters from a reconfigured blend of science and imaginative speculation. The field of nineteenth-century biology itself was marked by some strange theories that made natural history look weirder than it used to, for example in the ways that species distinctions blurred when viewed through an evolutionary lens. In 1837, Charles Darwin wrote in his notebook: If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, suffering and famine – our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements – they may partake [of?] our origin in one common ancestor – we may be all melted together.8

A key insight of evolutionary theory was the possibility of a shared origin for humans and other animals, a “melted” state in which no species differentiation existed. Evolutionary theory, by rewriting the story of species origin, created an abhistory, of the kind discussed in Chapter 2, for life on earth; it offered a new explanatory narrative of existence that continued to run in the contemporary world alongside the traditional story of creation. Further, this new history was populated by strange, long-gone creatures, only partially knowable through fossils or through modern surviving types. Human identity was rewritten, “melted” into unimaginable forms in its ancient past. Wells and Hodgson make use of this melting, of an essential biological kinship at the level of body (Wells) and cell (Hodgson), while their monsters, like Helen Vaughan, are also weird glimpses ahead to possible evolutionary futures for which the contemporary world is not ready.

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The notion of a “common ancestor” suggested both a continuing kinship between different animals, and an overall instability in the form of species. Christine Kenyon-Jones identifies a growing “sense of kinship” between humans and animals during the nineteenth century, and mammals especially held an important place in Victorian culture, both cherished and symbolically worrisome.9 Recognition of humans as part of the biological world rather than its divinely created masters produced tensions between a heightened respect for animal being and unease, even horror, at their biological closeness. Although Darwin did not include human ancestry in On the Origin of Species (1859), the implications of his work were clear: if humans had evolved from the same lower organisms as other animals, and if evolution was a perpetual, gradual process, then it was impossible to say whether evolution away from lower organisms was complete, or indeed possible. In the quoted example, Darwin’s attention is on animals. However, as he and other natural scientists continued to develop their field, distinctions not only between humans and non-human animals but between all living kingdoms looked increasingly hazy.10 “[E]ven the two pedigrees of the animal and vegetable kingdom are connected at their lowest roots,” wrote Ernst Haeckel in The History of Creation.11 Such ideas were rich with troubling potential in a Victorian society that, broadly speaking, was proud of its sophistication and infused with Christian beliefs in humanity’s divine separation from animals.12 Resistance to the theory of natural selection was significant, especially after Origin of Species appeared, and especially from the Christian church. The fierce debates between Darwin’s supporters and detractors are well-known, mythologised by public clashes such as the Oxford debate between T. H. Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce in 1860.13 At root, the problem was that Darwinian evolutionary theory “brought into question the special place that humans believed they occupied on the earth, at the top of a great chain of being – a chain that now threatened to become, in Darwin’s metaphor, a tree on which humans occupied merely one branch among many.”14 Evolutionary theory had the potential to overturn the authority of a long-standing (and still persistent now) anthropocentric worldview positioning human beings as natural masters of the earth, qualitatively superior to non-human life. Hodgson’s and Wells’s stories level that anthropocentric hierarchy: Doctor Moreau demonstrates the shared physicality of humans and other animals; Hodgson’s short stories go even further, displacing the primacy not only of the human but of any animal.

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His weird tales posit a fundamental similarity between all forms of life and elevate humble cryptogams to the complexity of mammals. Darwin’s work, as previous scholars have established, infused nineteenth-century culture, “feeding an extraordinary range of disciplines beyond its own original biological field,” including literature.15 The image of animal shapes melted together suggests a collapse of the limits of not only human but all species identity. Creatures’ bodies possessed an “essential mutability”; evolution by natural selection suggested that “any morphic transmutation was possible, given time, chance, and species variability.”16 Species’ instability and the theoretical potential for any shape of living creature to evolve opened new conceptual spaces which speculative writers like Wells and Hodgson could populate with monsters and other strange life forms. The project of exploring shared physicality between species belonged to more areas of biology than evolutionary theory alone. Wells’s own anatomical Textbook of Biology (1892) demonstrates observable similarities of groups of animals such as mammals through dissection of a rabbit. Other fields, including Louis Pasteur’s work in microbiology and Anton de Bary’s studies in mycology, along with cell biology, physiology, and anatomy, suggested the same situation. In his 1905 biography of Haeckel, Wilhelm Bölsche recalls how the cell-state theory of German biologist Rudolf Virchow transformed understanding of the organisation of living organisms in the 1870s. If the life of the human body was “merely the sum of the vital processes and functions of [its] millions of individual cells,” Bölsche reflects, there was “nothing to prevent us from thinking that in the combination of these various cells into communities each of them brought with it its little psychic individuality”; in short, “is not what we call ‘the soul’ really the product of the millions upon millions of separate souls of these cells?”17 If human souls existed and had a biological basis, it must be in cells and therefore be shared with any cellular organism. If not, what’s left is an eerie failure of presence: no soul, and the barren prospect of a wholly material existence. To recognise biological closeness between, rather than only within, the Linnean kingdoms of life was to question the security of human superiority within the animal kingdom, as well as the primacy of animals more generally amongst species. The baffling interstitial existence of slime moulds, fungi, and lichen—cryptogams—cast doubts on the rest of the implied hierarchy of the tree of life, too. The radically destabilising potential of biology in the nineteenth century ran wide and deep. But so

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did resistance to the ontological implications of scientific advances. Not only did these developments threaten to overturn human superiority, but they also offered to unpick the sacred or sublime mysteries of the world— and therefore, like some branches of physics, to undermine some of the theological foundations on which much of the moral and social order in Britain and Europe was based.18 Species that defied the natural order, may, like the singing flowers and walking furniture described by Ambrose in Machen’s The White People, be inherently sinful, inherently weird.19 The weird fictions of this chapter have an ambivalent relationship with mainstream science and create, within their heterotopic storyworlds, their own versions of scientific knowledge.

Pumas and Rabbits: The Horrors and Hopes of The Island of Doctor Moreau The weird’s fascination with the fringes of scientific knowledge and what lies beyond lingers around the edges of The Island of Doctor Moreau. “Science,” Wells wrote in 1891, “is a match that man has just got alight” and which offers “just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on […] and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated – darkness still.”20 In a scientific, materialist worldview, for Wells, the scope for wonder and terror in the universe does not contract but unfolds. Wells’s second scientific romance, Doctor Moreau, did not diminish but “intensif[ied] that sense of darkness just beyond the human limit of perception.”21 By pushing questions of the relationship between humans and non-human animals against, and even beyond, limits of empirical biological knowledge, theory, and practice, Doctor Moreau, without ceasing to be satire, gothic or evolutionary fable, also occupies the realm of the weird. With its physiological emphasis, Doctor Moreau was not seen by its first readers as a “Borderland” tale in the sense of the word’s reference to spiritualism and psychical research. Rather, it was received by some as anti-vivisectionist, arguably doing “more to render vivisection unpopular” than the societies attempting to do so.22 For others, the story was “intrinsically horrible” and “spoil[ed] a fine conception by greed of cheap horrors.”23 These horrors derive from Moreau’s engagement in vivisection, itself an almost borderland practice: vivisectors understood themselves to be at the forefront of innovative science, as “[p]ioneers in a new realm of

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knowledge.”24 Vivisection demonstrated modern scientists’ commitment to the advancement of medical and physiological knowledge. The horrors of Doctor Moreau, however, contrast to those generated in other borderland tales—The Great God Pan, for example. Where Dr. Raymond uses surgical techniques to extend human consciousness into the more-than-visible world, Moreau’s goal is to create a conscious human out of the visible, earthly flesh and bone of animal bodies, thus proving the material basis of rational thought and self-awareness. In this sense, Doctor Moreau directly opposes occult discourse. Discussing Wells’s “The Plattner Story” and “The Crystal Egg,” Genie Babb argues that Wells critiques spiritualism and psychical research by modelling the scientific method within these stories.25 Doctor Moreau can, similarly, be understood as a critique of “Borderland” thinking through its materialist assertion of the physical basis for language, consciousness, and anything else thought to distinguish humans from animals. There is no room in Moreau’s universe for spiritual souls, whether they are the sort that survive after death or not, only “souls of beasts,” which, if they exist, are based in matter and no different from those of humans (107). Instead, The Island of Doctor Moreau occupies a scientific borderland at the other extreme, in which embodiment can explain all the mysteries of existence. Moreau’s exile to imperial and cartographic fringes means that his island laboratory functions as a heterotopia, a cultural counter-site. In such a space, conventional theoretical, practical, and moral parameters of scientific experimentation can be reordered. As a vivisector, Moreau already uses controversial methods. But his aim to “burn out all the animal” and create “a rational creature” (106) lends his project “a psychological goal far more ambitious than the usual objects of physiological research.”26 Consequently, he adopts practices that marginalise him even among his fellow scientists. In particular, he eschews the use of anaesthetics, under which most vivisection took place, in part to defend it against the charge of causing unnecessary pain, forbidden by the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act.27 Moreau was driven out of London, Prendick recalls, because of the “Moreau Horrors” scandal, in which the escape of a flayed dog attracted public attention to Moreau’s experiments. Martin Willis argues that Moreau’s exile is determined not so much by his engagement in vivisection, nor even by his failure to follow the common practice of anaesthetising his subjects, but in his failure to keep his experiments concealed.

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Moreau draws the disapprobation not only of the public but also of the scientific community, which “turns its back on Moreau for tarnishing the reputation of scientific investigation.”28 Willis sees The Island of Doctor Moreau neither as anti-vivisectionist nor as unequivocally supporting the state of institutionalised science in the 1890s, but as a critical narrative that promotes publicly accountable advancement of scientific knowledge. The novel shows Moreau as the victim more of a powerful political body than as the perpetrator of moral crime. In fact, in blaming the institutionalised methods of scientific discovery, Wells suggests that vivisection is not the horrific practice that is appears to be. Horror, indeed, comes from power unchecked by public liability.29

By marginalising Moreau and pushing his activities out of sight, the public and scientific communities are implicated in their terrible results. Moreau’s experiments are displaced from their original urban context and freed from the public reactions that impede scientific investigation, but also regulate them. In the counter-site of his island heterotopia, everything about his experiments intensifies—their horror as well as their success, the possibilities of vivisection as well as its drawbacks, the decrease in Moreau’s accountability and the rise of his power. For Moreau, the possibilities of his experiments are tremendously significant and exciting. As early reviews of Doctor Moreau showed, as critical studies locating the novel within the gothic tradition have explored, and as Prendick often experiences, the Beast People generate a sense of monstrous terror through their violations and blendings of normative human and animal forms and behaviours.30 However, the Beast People are not, as Prendick first thinks, degenerated humans, but artificially developed animals with the potential to be something more than either. A sense of Moreau’s excitement surfaces in Wells’s speculative essay “The Limits of Individual Plasticity” (1895). This essay shares both words and underlying ideas with his 1896 novel. In it, Wells sets out the physiological principles that Moreau fictionally puts into action: “a living being may,” Wells wrote, “be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that may be shaped and altered […] and the organism as a whole developed far beyond its apparent possibilities.”31 There are no essential differences between the “raw materials” of living forms, only in the organisation of that matter. As T. H. Huxley, too, suggested in “On the Physical Basis

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of Life,” a basic “protoplasm […] is the clay of the potter; which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick.”32 For Wells, likewise, the direction of material plasticity need not be left to the blind chance of natural selection, for, “[i]f we concede the justifications of vivisection, we may imagine as possible in the future, operators, armed with an antiseptic surgery and a growing perfection in the knowledge of the laws of growth, taking living creatures and moulding them into the most amazing forms.”33 Like Moreau, Wells emphasises the potential of vivisection as a path towards “perfection” of organisms that are not terrible but “amazing.” David Hughes and Robert Philmus see Wells’s essay as an expression of his commitment to the capacity of human science to take ethical control of evolution, while Doctor Moreau “satirically balance(s) the ‘plastic’ possibilities of the organism against the limitations inherent by nature in it.”34 The novel does function as a gothic evolutionary satire through Moreau’s ultimate failure and the regressions of the Beast People and the human characters. But it also does more. Moreau’s ambitions look towards progression and advancement, aligning him with the other scientists of weird fiction and the weird’s progenerate impulses. He too is set apart from ordinary scientists not only by his techniques but also by the scope of his vision and ambition. Before his exile, Moreau was a “prominent and masterful physiologist […] well known in scientific circles for his extraordinary imagination” (42). Pain, as Moreau later explains to Prendick, is a vital component of his creative project. The “bath of burning pain” that is vivisection will “burn out all the animal,” creating not just a human but a perfected human: a “rational creature” (106). As Martin Danahay argues, Moreau’s project is essentially eugenic; he aims not to humanise animals but “to erase ‘animal’ altogether through the instruments of pain and death […] the ‘coming man’ evolves beyond the body and the animal.”35 Moreau’s experiments are no ordinary explorations in vivisection; their controversial qualities consist in their challenge to humanity’s relationship to its fleshly existence rather than in animal suffering. The “rational creature” Moreau hopes to produce would have none of the animal traits borne by human beings, and yet this being of pure reason would be made entirely of animal flesh, and therefore be contaminated by no traces of soul or grace either. Occult discourse sought to collapse the distinction between spirit and matter by constructing the more-than-visible world as a super-physical extension of the known world. Doctor Moreau seeks the same end, but in

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the direction of materialism. Rather than understanding spirit as a different kind of matter, anything that resembles the spiritual is, in fact, produced by the known, visible physical body. Harris argues that Moreau, by denying animal consciousness, “divide[s] flesh from spirit […] the animal under vivisection becomes inert matter.”36 However, Moreau’s experiment is far from being a “bodiless exercise of pure reason.”37 The point is rather that reason and body are the one and the same: a reasoning mind, here, is a material product of the organisation of the body, but that does not stop it being a marvel. Moreau’s experiments expose brutal realities about the biological similarities between mammalian species, including humans. They also threaten (or promise, depending on one’s perspective) to unravel the “mysteries” behind human consciousness. The puma, the creature “not human, not animal, but hellish” glimpsed by Prendick as it runs screaming from the laboratory, exemplifies Moreau ’s forays into the borderlands of physiology. Struggling against the continual return of the beast in his experimental subjects, as “[f]irst one animal trait, then another, creeps to the surface and stares out at me,” Moreau claims he is “drawing near the fastness. This puma of mine –” (106). Moreau does not finish the sentence, in another weird lacuna where language fails, but admits “some hope” of success with the puma: “I have worked hard at her head and brain” (107). The physical reorganisation of an animal’s mental organ may be the breakthrough to producing a superior, “rational creature” beyond both human and animal. Such a possibility can exist as real in Moreau’s island heterotopia when it cannot in mainstream science. The escaped puma indeed appears, like the transformed Mrs. Black, as “not human, not animal.” To Prendick, carrier of the culture to which Moreau’s island represents a counter-site, she is “hellish”; to Moreau, she is “hope.” In this way, the novel equivocates about how Moreau’s ambitions and methods should be judged. Significantly, moral concerns of antivivisectionists were “not primarily the ethics surrounding human treatment of animals, but rather the consequences for the vivisector,” principally the degradation of their moral character.38 Anne DeWitt points out that “Wells links Moreau’s moral hardening to his motives for pursuing research: the novel emphasises that he is not driven by an altruistic desire to alleviate suffering, but rather by the ‘overmastering spell of research’.”39 In Moreau’s counter-site, which evades such social constructs in their usual forms, the scientist can remain morally untouched by his grim methods. Towards the end of their conversation about the

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puma, Moreau himself appears to Prendick not as a sadistic madman but as a man “with calm eyes” and a touch of “serenity,” “beauty,” and “tranquility” (107). Thus are the “Moreau Horrors” revised into a seemingly grand and noble scientific ambition. This illusion does not last, as Moreau’s counter-site gradually descends into chaos, and eventually Prendick is left alone to settle into some sort of equilibrium with the former Beast People. But while the illusion persists, the narrative remains ambivalent about moral judgement of Moreau. Moreau aims to create a perfected rational creature, in an anthropocentric expression of the capacity of human science to take control over its own biology and evolution, while his failure to fulfil his ambitions overturns that anthropocentricity. Prendick’s final experiences of himself, and ultimately all Londoners, as fundamentally animal, close the novel with a sense that humans and animals share equally in an embodied existence that they cannot transcend, while revealing human morality as an illusion exposes the blind indifference of the universe characteristic of the weird. Moreau’s belief in a purely rational embodied existence, however, aligns the novel with other weird narratives, seeking to transcend the quotidian through the manipulations of matter newly made possible by science. Accordingly, Moreau does produce some surprising successes, although not in the ways he intended. The attention of critics of Doctor Moreau is, like Prendick’s, predominantly on the Beast People and the representation of their monstrous, recombinant bodies in which both human and animal forms can be traced: “the human mark distorted but did not hide the leopard, or the ox, or the sow, or other animal or animals, from which the creature had been moulded” (113). In this way, the Beast People display the physicality all mammals share, and Prendick’s response to them with “shivering horror” (113) reflects anxieties over that kinship that accompanied changing constructions of the relationship between humans and animals in the nineteenth century. The Beast People are “parodies of humanity, grotesque doppelgängers,” and through the horror they generate the novel “maintains a relentless Gothic tension.”40 The colourful gothic appeal of the Hyaena-Swine or the Wolf-Bear and the focalisation of the narrative through Prendick’s eyes work together to draw the attention of readers to the Beast People. A side effect of this emphasis is that the strangest of Moreau’s creations are left almost completely overlooked, including by Prendick: his pink rabbits. The weirdest products of Moreau’s experiments are “strange, pink, hopping animals, about the size of cats” (85). Prendick first encounters

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them briefly as he flees what he believes to be the prospect of his own vivisection at Moreau’s hands. They reappear a few chapters later, as Prendick recounts: Montgomery called my attention to certain little pink animals with long hind legs, that went leaping through the undergrowth. He told me they were creatures made of the offspring of the Beast People, that Moreau had invented. He had fancied they might serve for meat, but a rabbit-like habit of devouring their young had defeated this intention. (117)

Unlike the Beast People, these creatures do not inspire horror, revulsion, or uncanny feelings of recognition in Prendick. Instead, Prendick examines “rather a pretty little creature; and, as Montgomery stated that it never destroyed the turf by burrowing, and was very cleanly in its habits, I should imagine it might provide a convenient substitute for the common rabbit in gentlemen’s parks” (118). These creatures are twice manufactured. They are “made of the offspring of the Beast People,” but are presented without a trace of horror. Instead, Prendick compares them to cats and rabbits and wishes to appropriate them as commodities within his culture’s domestic social and economic order. These creatures cannot be readily assimilated into a gothic framework. Although their bodies, like those of the Beast People, are monstrous in that they violate normative animal shapes by resembling both rabbits and cats, they pose no apparent threat to human identity. They appropriate neither human body shape nor language and social behaviour in the way that the Beast People in their outcast community do. However, in one sense, Prendick should be worried, because more than any other of his creations these animals prove Moreau right, in principle. They prove that in this fictional heterotopia there is “some sanction for the belief that […] the thread of life might be preserved unimpaired while shape and mental superstructure were so extensively recast as even to justify our regarding the result as a new variety of being.”41 Moreau’s desire to recreate a perfected human mentality may have failed, but he has succeeded in shaping “a new variety of being” around a persisting “thread of life.” So, although The Island of Doctor Moreau tempers the arguments of Wells’s essay by suggesting there are limits to plasticity, it leaves open a small rip, just big enough to glimpse another weird biological borderland. The counter-site of Moreau’s island creates a space in which an alternative version of evolutionary inheritance can exist, to which the “creatures

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made of the offspring of the Beast People, that Moreau had invented,” are key. The existence of Moreau’s pink rabbits signals Lamarckian theories of evolution that Wells had largely rejected, if rather unwillingly. Philmus and Hughes see The Island of Doctor Moreau as a fictional effort by Wells to “harmoniz[e] his need to believe in some kind of Lamarckian inheritance with the scientific disproof of Lamarck by Weismann.”42 If they are indeed “grafted hybrids” biologically, the Beast People should not be able to breed.43 But they can breed and produce offspring apparently resembling neither the Beast People nor their original animal forms (evidently, the offspring are only suitable to be turned into small rabbit-like creatures, rather than take their turn at being reshaped into people). This next generation suggests that, on some level at least, some modifications acquired during the organism’s lifetime are inheritable: a Lamarckian, not Darwinian, process. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, set out in Philosophie Zoologique (1809), proposed that changes in animal forms came about through changes in habits, thus causing the use or disuse of organs, in response to their environment. These changes were preserved and, if common to both reproducing individuals, inherited by the next generation.44 Lamarck’s ideas were popular and influenced Darwin’s thinking in Origin of Species, but were overturned by later evolutionists including German biologist August Weismann.45 Nevertheless, if Lamarck’s theory was inadequate, a better one remained elusive. Darwin was not able to explain how variations within species appeared, nor the mechanisms by which they were transmitted to future generations.46 Until the “rediscovery” in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s pioneering work in genetics, “Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden” (1866), these questions remained unsatisfactorily answered.47 That said, both Darwin and Weismann did propose theories to explain inheritance that revolved around information-carrying material passed on from parent to offspring. Darwin’s “provisional hypothesis,” outlined in The Variation of Plants and Animals Under Domestication (1868), was called “pangenesis”48 ; here “gemmules” in the blood carried information about bodily adaptations to the reproductive cells. Weismann, who favoured Lamarck’s theory at first, explicitly refuted it in 1883 and proposed that continuity of a “germ plasm” was the means of inheritance. Only changes here would transmit variations to future generations— which turned out broadly correct in principle, if not in details.49 Weismann explained new characteristics by identifying sexual reproduction as

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“an inexhaustible source of ever new combinations of individual variation.”50 The appearance of new variations not inherited from the parents derived from “germinal selection” taking place within the germ plasm (a sort of struggle for nutrients), alongside natural selection between organisms. Wells entered directly into this conversation. In “The Biological Problem of Today” (1894), he dismissed Weismann’s theories as “charming” but resting on a missupposition about the workings of cells.51 By 1895, in “Bio-optimism,” he had accepted Weismann’s refutation of Lamarck “[o]f necessity.”52 After 1900, Mendelian genetics quickly explained the appearance and inheritance of variations, but when Wells was writing in the 1890s, Weismann’s theories were still part of a live debate. The Island of Doctor Moreau participates in this wider conversation about variation and inheritance, particularly through the breeding of the Beast People. In Lamarck’s theory, changes in habit and behaviour lead to modification of the organism’s structure. The changes from animal to Beast Person, however, are effected by Moreau’s actions. Modification of structure, therefore, leads to changes in the creatures’ habits and behaviour (as they learn to communicate and live in a social group, for example), rather than the other way around. In “Individual Plasticity,” Wells assures his readers that, contra Lamarck, “[i]t is not asserted that the change effected would change in anyway the offspring of such a creature, but only that the creature itself as an individual is capable of such recasting.”53 But in the same essay Wells goes on to argue that not only body shape, but “[t]he physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature, may also be made to undergo an enduring modification.”54 These words are repeated verbatim by Moreau to Prendick (96). On some level, this means, fundamental and lasting changes to the basic chemistry of an animal may indeed be induced. In this sense, The Island of Doctor Moreau resonates more closely with Weismann’s theories than with Lamarck’s: Moreau has, in these terms, succeeded in modifying the germ plasm, so that changes in the “chemical rhythm” of his creatures are fundamental enough to be passed on. However, Wells objected to Weismann’s position that the germ plasm is passed on perfectly from parents to offspring, because that did not account for the appearance of variations.55 Perfect transmission of the germ plasm suggested “infinitude,” but also implied a nihilistic “discardability of individual bodies for the force of life.”56 Doctor Moreau’s version of evolution allows more space for changes between individuals. The

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offspring of the Beast People, which vary from their parents, undermine a solidly Weismannian reading of Doctor Moreau; they take a new, if undisclosed, form that is neither a copy of one of the parent Beast People nor a copy of one of the original animals. Doctor Moreau both uses and undermines existing available evolutionary theories in order to explore a system of its own that hovers somewhere between Lamarckism and Weismann’s neo-Darwinism. Somehow, Moreau has succeeded in inventing a brand new species, which even, as Montgomery explains, can itself breed.57 Since they can breed, the pink hopping creatures are arguably the most successful of Moreau’s inventions. They are an “invented” species of generic, unnamed animals, in contrast to the specialised recombinants identified as Leopard-Man or Hyena-Swine. Yet even they may not be successful enough; their “rabbit-like habit of devouring their young” disappoints Montgomery’s hopes for a sustainable source of meat on the island. The ultimate fate of the evolutionary experiments of Moreau’s island is rather bleak, suggesting the failure of ethical human direction of evolution in favour of the survival of only the lowliest, most generic, and most adaptable species. In the novel’s Prologue, Prendick’s nephew lists “certain curious white moths, some hogs and rabbits, and some rather peculiar rats” as the animals found on Noble’s Isle by the crew of H. M. S. Scorpion. If the allusions to creatures with “curious” or “peculiar” traits may be taken as an indication that these sailors did indeed land on Moreau’s island, then the surviving remnants of the Beast People and their descendants have completed their evolution into some simpler animal types better fitted to survive: insects and rodents. In this way, the pink hopping creatures prove that Moreau’s experiments at inducing permanent and heritable variations in animal form have a limited success, but also reveal his inevitable failure, because the processes of natural selection are ultimately more powerful than artificial modification by human hand. At the same time, to maintain the unknowability of the heterotopic counter-site, the empirical evidence of the weird slides out of reach and is left suggestive rather than definite. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, the weird mode creates a narrative space in which marginal regions of evolutionary science and physiology can be explored. Here, strange new bodily forms can exist, and the principle of a shared physicality between humans and other animals can be pursued to its logical extremes. By doing so, Wells can fictionally stage the anatomical speculations theorised in his essays, especially “Individual

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Plasticity,” and reinvent, to a degree, the terms of evolutionary inheritance. In the next section, the weird heterotopias of Hodgson’s fiction also provide spaces in which the mutual biological basis of life can be tested, leading to strange transformations embodying both the marvels and the terrors of the scientific borderlands.

The “Boundary Kingdom”: William Hope Hodgson’s Cryptogamy Like The Island of Doctor Moreau, Hodgson’s stories assume a shared physiological basis underpinning the life of all biological kingdoms and use the heterotopic qualities of islands and ocean to create spaces in which weird forms can flourish and normative relationships between groups of organisms can be reconstructed. In the two short stories discussed here, the malleable and liminal forms of cryptogams are used to produce monsters that blur the boundaries of animal and plant and of alive and notalive. “The Voice in the Night” combines human with fungus to suggest a new, composite form of life, while “The Derelict” transforms even inanimate matter to inaugurate a new slime mould type. There is no particular evidence that Hodgson was directly aware of fin-de-siècle botanical debates about cryptogams in the way there is for Wells through his anatomy and physiology publications. Hodgson’s writing, arguably, is as much influenced by the fiction of Wells and other popular authors such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Arthur Conan Doyle as by the cultural circulations of popular science. Nevertheless, the stories exhibit a clear attraction to the fictional possibilities of that puzzling group of organisms—cryptogams—suggesting that their interstitial nature was part of general knowledge. “Cryptogam” is the best-fitting contemporary term, current in the late nineteenth century.58 It was a practical botanical grouping rather than a taxonomical category, a receptacle for rather disparate types like fungi, lichen, and slime moulds that presented similarly and were taken as sort-of plants without seeds or flowers (fungi and slime moulds now belong to different kingdoms). Debates about distinctions between kingdoms, especially animals and plants, had a long history in natural science. In the second edition of History of Creation (1892), Ernst Haeckel used the suggestive phrase “doubtful beings” to describe protists, the taxonomical kingdom that included slime moulds59 ; the uncertainties of the previous century, during which John Hunter

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recorded that general opinion was “not determined on where the animal ends and where the vegetable begins,” remained unresolved.60 Alternatively, perhaps, nineteenth-century biology had only increased the questions rather than the answers by elaborating the puzzles of cryptogams, for example, or carnivorous plants. In Insectivorous Plants (1875), Darwin draws parallels between the carnivorous plant Drosera (sundew) and animals, including the composition of digestive fluids and responses to stimuli. Drosera, he observes, “may be said to feed like an animal,” while in an experiment: Nothing could be more striking than the appearance of the above four leaves, each with their tentacles pointing truly to the two little masses of the phosphate on their discs. We might imagine that we were looking at a lowly organised animal seizing prey with its arms.61

Plants like Drosera showed that distinctions between the two kingdoms of animals and plants were not always adequate, and that intriguingly liminal organisms could exist, albeit at the more “lowly” end of the evolutionary scale. Darwin’s work on Drosera also, for one modern biologist, reveals a tendency in the history of biology to privilege animal existence over plants, fungi, and other cryptogams.62 This description of Drosera relegates the “organisation” of the plant to a “lowly” status, rather recognising the sophistication of a plant with a surprising combination of characteristics. This representation sits close to how popular fiction of the time registered carnivorous plants. Hodgson’s 1907 novel The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” features anthropophagous trees as well as invented recombined animal forms populating remote and isolated islands. As I have examined elsewhere, Boats creates remote marine spaces in which new forms of animal life can exist, according to alternative evolutionary paths, in environments in which they, rather than human beings, have a right to exist as successful species.63 Boats also follows a tradition of carnivorous tree stories including Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The American’s Tale” (1879), Phil Robinson’s “The Man-Eating Tree” (1881), and Frank Aubrey’s “The Devil Tree of Eldorado” (1897).64 Hodgson’s novel, however, adds a fungal twist to the anthropophagous tree premise. The stranded sailors venture among what look like trees on the banks of a strange island creek, only to discover human faces within the branches. Narrator Winterstraw observes that a “brown, human face

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peering at us from between the wrapped branches […] was of a part with the trunk of the tree; for I could not tell where it ended and the tree began.”65 Boundaries between the original human and the apparent plant that absorbed it have dissolved. This monster bleeds when stabbed, like a “live creature,” and its “cabbage-like” appendages move like “an evil serpent.”66 Tree and human and reptile are melted together, not only combining animal classes but also blending the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Yet the tree-monsters of Boats are not simply overgrown carnivorous plants; Hodgson’s innovation is something even more transgressive. Winterstraw touches the tree-monster to find that “its trunk was as soft as pulp under my fingers, much after the fashion of a mushroom.”67 The fungal analogy indicates morphic potential as well as positioning it as an organism neither animal nor plant: more like a cryptogam. In a number of ways, cryptogams have an obvious appeal to a writer of weird tales. Their malleability means they can easily be imagined to look like a human, or a tree, or a ship, emphasising monsters’ transgressive plasticity and their resistance of classification. The creatures created out of substances like fungus, mould, or lichen in Hodgson’s stories are not hybrids of animals and plants, but something else altogether. They cannot be mapped onto the rules for either kingdom: too mobile for plants, for example, yet too resilient under tearing and cutting to be animals. The monster, says Jeffrey Weinstock, “undoes our understanding of the way things are and violates our sense of how they are supposed to be. […] The ‘unnaturalness’ of the monster inheres in its violation of established conceptual categories.”68 Cryptogams do precisely that. Upsetting established categories of animals and plants, they caused fractures in which weird inventions of life could flourish, “doubtful beings” could become certain, and notions of natural and unnatural, alive and not alive, or animate and inanimate, may be redefined. Fungi had long been deeply implicated in questions of distinctions between Linnean kingdoms, with Linnaeus reporting having observed, he thought, a relationship between “seeds” of fungi and animalcula infusoria in 1767, while entomogenous fungi, which grow on insects, were at first taken by some biologists for a kind of “vegetable fly.”69 A conception of fungi as interstitial organisms, that potentially could change between being plants and being animals, persisted in biology until around the 1860s.70 Like animals and plants, fungi are eukaryotes, so classified for their level of complex cellular organisation. All three diverged from the same “primitive, almost proto-fungal stem” and thus share “the eukaryote

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last common ancestor.”71 This is how fungi are known to modern biology. Haeckel speculated similarly in The Wonders of Life (1905), but until the middle of the twentieth century the consensus was to classify fungi with plants, albeit as a distinct group.72 The classification was problematic because in some ways, cryptogams also resembled animals. Haeckel found fungi to “inhale oxygen and give out carbonic acid like animals,”73 and Anton de Bary observed that some Myxomycete (slime mould) spores moved with “a hopping and an amoeboid creeping movement.”74 For these kinds of reasons, in 1866 Haeckel proposed an “intermediate” kingdom of life, called “Protista”: “a ‘boundary kingdom intermediate between the animal and vegetable kingdoms’ containing organisms ‘neither animals nor plants’.”75 Protista were understood to be something else; biologist C. Clifford Dobell pinpointed their “great importance” as “a group of living beings which are organised upon quite a different principle from that of other organisms.”76 The evident insufficiency of plant and animal categories for explaining the natural world had led to the important step of recognising that life might exist based on alternative principles, perhaps not yet fully understood. Both de Bary and Haeckel distinguished Myxomycetes from fungi. Haeckel included Myxomycetes in kingdom Protista, but, despite some pondering, decided to leave fungi “among plants, though many naturalists have separated them altogether from the vegetable kingdom.”77 In later work, though, he retreated from the idea of a third kingdom, dividing plants and animals into two kingdoms stemming from simpler single and multi-cellular organisms. For some biologists, fungi were failed plants. Henri Bergson suggested that fungi, despite their global profusion, “have not been able to evolve” and “might be called the abortive children of the vegetable world.”78 Fungi suggest decay and decline. Critic Anthony Camara suggests that “the dysmorphic fungal body” threatens “human devolution and a degrading return to a less organised primordial state of being,” but he also notes its contradictory, ambivalent biological status was something “unreal” and “undead.”79 Feeding on dead matter, a fungus transforms old material into new living shapes; it is also a greedy, excessive form of life. In earlier natural history, fungi were implicated in theories of spontaneous generation of life, because they appeared to grow unexpectedly on dead matter apparently without parents.80 Italian Lazzaro Spallanzani proved the existence of spores in 1776, however, and Louis Pasteur’s mid-nineteenth century observations of ferments and air-borne germs

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also challenged spontaneous generation theory.81 By the 1880s, it was a marginalised theory, unsupported by reasonable evidence, although at least one British biologist, Henry Charlton Bastian, believed that evolution “required the possibility of a transition from inanimate to living matter,” and continued to publish on the topic until 1915.82 This transition occurs in “The Derelict”: spontaneous generation authenticates the sudden existence of a complex monster lacking an evolutionary history of natural selection over time. As Ben Woodard elaborates, Hodgson “introduces the truly horrifying aspect of biology as endlessly spatial and naturally mutated, as growth unbound. […] The stench of death is also the stench of fertilization, of a turning over in the churning teeth of nature.”83 Hodgson’s weird mouldy creatures are paradoxically fecund and creative, growing rather than decaying; they challenge assumptions about cryptogams as lowly backsliders by presenting as new, progenerate natural forms. The stories promote a shared physical basis for life between organisms of different kingdoms and create spaces in which cryptogams can evolve, elevated to a status in the natural world equal to that of animals and plants. There is, then, something almost intrinsically weird about fungi and other cryptogams as they were understood (or not understood) at the fin de siècle. Hodgson’s monstrous biological transgressions exist in heterotopic spaces of ships and islands, in which the principles on which complex organisms are based can be reimagined. They belong to a boundary kingdom that allows for the existence of liminal organisms, extending the notion of common ancestry beyond animals alone to propose a shared physical basis for all life (however “life” might be defined). As an inspiration for fiction, the boundary kingdom encapsulates the weird worldview this book has been exploring: that a resolutely material universe is nonetheless textured with wonders and terrors just beyond the limits of normal experience and comprehension.

Doubtful Beings: “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict” Through its representation of a new, unnameable identity, “The Voice in the Night” unsettles not only the borders of normative human shape, but also the distinctions between animate and inanimate life. The story is narrated by a sailor, hailed on a becalmed night by an unseen rower who begs food but refuses to come within sight or lamplight. This castaway

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recounts a strange tale of shipwreck, and the gradual assimilation of his and his fiancée’s bodies by a grey lichen or fungus that abounds on the remote island and nearby derelict ship on which they take refuge. The story ends as follows: Indistinctly I saw something nodding between the oars. I thought of a sponge – a great, grey nodding sponge – The oars continued to ply. They were grey – as was the boat – and my eyes searched a moment vainly for the conjunction of hand and oar. […] Then the oars were dipped, the boat shot out of the patch of light, and the – the thing went nodding into the mist.84

The halting progress of these sentences demonstrates the narrator’s inability to find appropriate language to describe what he sees. This “thing” defies existing linguistic schema; in Weinstock’s terms, it “undoes” and “violates” the narrator’s current ontological expectations. Hurley, similarly, identifies the broken syntax as “a rupture of conceptual systems […] Within this rupture, where lies an abhuman identity for which there is as yet no language, is inserted the word ‘Thing’.”85 In Hodgson’s stories, as in The Island of Doctor Moreau, the fear of losing bodily integrity (or becoming “abhuman,” a term Hurley draws from Hodgson’s The Night Land), often causes unspeakable, unidentifiable bodies to be labelled “things.” The “thing” is the uncategorisable monster, the new kind of life that has formed in the gap between known kingdoms. What has formed in the gap? The fungus of “The Voice in the Night” at first lacks a particular shape or form, appearing as “patches of growth,” “nodules,” or “grey masses” (116–7). Although an inanimate fungal growth, its monstrous life is signalled by its excessive vitality. On the island, it is “growing riot”; on the ship, it grows “persistently” (117, 118). This weird fungus feeds not only on dead matter but also on living: it accumulates on the castaways’ bodies “with monstrous rapidity” (120) and increasingly appears alive: it rose into horrible, fantastic mounds, which seemed almost to quiver, as if with a quiet life, when the wind below across them. Here and there it took on the forms of vast fingers, and in others it just spread out flat and smooth and treacherous. (117)

Possessing a new kind of “quiet” life, this skilful organism adopts human shapes (converting, we understand, the bodies of previous castaways) and

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is anthropomorphised through the attribution of the sentient trait of treachery. Even before it claims human bodies, though, the fungus thrives to the extent of having agency of its own. The castaway, having “seized” a rope to ascend onto the derelict ship in the lagoon, immediately observes that a “grey, lichenous fungus” has also “seized” “upon the rope and blotched the side of the ship lividly” (116). The activity of the fungus mimics human activity, and vice versa. Later, the fungus is described as having “seized upon our bodies,” shortly before the castaways, stricken with “inhuman desire […] seized a mass of the fungus” to eat (119, 120). Their actions are mirrored; both fungus and human grasp and consume the body of the other. Where the tree-monsters of Boats consume humans, here the humans are equally implicated in consuming the monster. In this union, they become something new—neither human nor simply fungus. Their transformation leads the castaways to question the nature of their existence. First, the castaway hesitates over identifying himself as a man: “I am only an old – man” he tells the narrator (111). The hesitation suggests a decision between man and “thing”: “the word chosen each time is the properly human one; the pause indicates that it is no longer relevant, no longer adequate.”86 Later, he hesitates over speaking of “the terror which has come into our – lives” (115). Not only is a human identity inadequate, but the fact of being alive, of having a life, is now questionable. He has become a doubtful being. The castaways’ bodies are assimilated from within and without, as the boundaries of human shape dissolve and they are transformed into “inhuman” monsters—in their form, and in their behaviour (their unnatural appetite for the monstrous subject). When the pair first find patches of fungus on their hands and face, they are “all at once, afraid of something worse than death” (118). That threat may be a dissolution of human identity, “a degrading return to a less organised primordial state of being.”87 However, human superiority is not a given in a post-Darwinian world, nor in a heterotopia where cultural and scientific norms are inverted. From the perspective of the fungus, organisational complexity is increasing. The feared “something” also represents a continuation of life beyond the loss of human identity. As the story progresses, the relationship between the fungus and human life thus emerges as exceedingly close. We later gather that the “nodules several feet in height,” first observed on the derelict ship, are the remains, or transformation, of a former crew (116). Near the story’s

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end, the castaway encounters “an extraordinarily shaped mass of fungus […] swaying uneasily as though it possessed life of its own” (120). At first appearing to be a growth of fungus come to life, the castaway notices “the thing had a grotesque resemblance to the figure of a distorted human creature.” It is “the end of one of these men who had come to the island in the ship in the lagoon; and in that monstrous ending I had seen our own” (120). The “ending” of his life, from the perspective of the castaway, is the ending of his human identity, yet the vitality of the fungus belies an equation of “ending” with “death.” Together fungus and human become, inexorably, a new form of life. What that is remains uncertain and there is no language to describe it: “and so – and so – we who had been human became – Well, it matters less each day” (120). Yet given the anxiety over the loss of human identity attending most of the story, why should it cease to matter? It may be a reflection of altering brain functions as he ceases to care, but it may indicate a relinquishing of the idea of human shape as significant. Whatever else this transformation does, it does away with anthropocentricity, restoring a sense of human embeddedness or entanglement in a Darwinian nature.88 The castaway may be learning to accept his new fungal self, recognising that souls, bodies, and even thought itself can be non-, or more-than, human.89 The idea of “becoming” points to continuation: not as human, but, as a “distorted human,” not purely fungal either. “The Voice in the Night” captures both the repulsive horror of this loss of human identity and the inevitability of the continuation of life in what seems like an unimaginably monstrous “thing-like” form. But in evolutionary terms “what seems the monster may [be] a new type ‘waiting’ for the right conditions to thrive.”90 Although, or rather because the nodding “thing” is beyond direct linguistic representation, a “monstrous ending” may also be a beginning. Response to the “thing” is “a function of lack of recognition, rather than any uncanny resurgence.”91 The “beginning” constructed in “The Voice in the Night” is too unfamiliar for conventional human schema of language, identity, or a divinely arranged natural order to assimilate. The narrator first refers to the “voice in the night” as the “Invisible,” a label suggesting the castaway’s marginality and estrangement from a human reality, and “some unintelligible dread” keeps the castaway from coming too close to the narrator’s ship. The narrator pointedly asserts his belief that the Invisible “was not mad, but sanely facing some intolerable horror,” further emphasising the castaway’s position at

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a strange existential interface between the human and some other state of materiality (114). The castaway describes himself and his companion as “outcast souls,” beyond the reach of God or the natural order of the world associated with divine ordinance; sure enough, at the end the nodding mould-man vanishes into a “ghostly and mournful” otherworldly mist (121). The castaway’s struggle to identify suitable nouns and verbs—“man,” “lady,” “lives”—is not only a struggle to name terrestrial strangeness or the emergence of a new type, but also marks an encounter with something as far beyond language as it is beyond intelligibility and tolerance. “The Derelict,” too, presents a strange new species. With a scientifically rationalised and theorised premise, in its expression of enigmatic horror it also invokes the weird’s sense of vast cosmic awe. The narrating doctor’s speculations on the material conditions producing this new organism include his Carnacki-like understanding of the “Life-Force” as one of “the Outer Forces – Monsters of the Void”92 : the adventure with the mouldship is not only an encounter with an alien life but also a glimpse into the awesome secrets of the universe and finding them terrible. Originally published in the Red Magazine in 1912, “The Derelict” encapsulates Hodgson’s efforts to imagine new and alien forms of life through the weird environment of the sea. A group of sailors, investigating what appears to be a derelict hulk, find themselves aboard a living ship formed out of a voracious grey-white mould and barely escape with their lives. Where the fungus of “The Voice in the Night” combines with living human forms to create a new type of life, here the dead wood of the ship has provided material and structure. The story explicitly debates the conditions that might originate life. The tale of the living Derelict is recounted by the ship’s doctor, now an old man, to a younger framing narrator. Hodgson’s story therefore starts and finishes with their conversations about the cause of the phenomenon: What has transformed a wooden hulk into a living monster? Discussions of spores or air-borne germs are absent, however, and instead the doctor ruminates on the “Life-Force,” arguing that life is possible in any sort of matter: So potent is the share of the Material in the production of that thing which we name Life, and so eager the Life-force to express itself, that I am convinced it would, given the right conditions, make itself manifest even through so hopeless-seeming a medium as a simple block of sawn

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wood; for I tell you, gentlemen, the Life-Force is both as fiercely urgent and as indiscriminate as Fire – the Destructor; yet which some are now growing to consider the very essence of Life rampant. (33)

The doctor’s language poses “life” as a vigorous energy, powerful enough to generate life even in “hopeless-seeming,” “simple block[s]” of matter, echoing Huxley’s comparison of protoplasm to “clay” and “commonest brick[s]” cited earlier. The doctor’s account of the “Life-Force” recalls early nineteenth-century debates such as those between John Abernethy and William Lawrence over vitalism—whether life required a superadded substance or was merely an effect of material parts.93 The doctor’s ruminations also resonate with the élan vital , or vital impetus, posited by Bergson in L’Évolution Créatrice (1907) (translated as Creative Evolution). The élan vital is the force which can transform a food store as if it were “a kind of explosive, which needs only the spark to discharge the energy it stores.”94 For Bergson, all life resembles “an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter, would fain do all at once.”95 In these terms, the organisation of a living thing resembles an engine, requiring an igniting “spark” to transform stored energy and control it to produce “work,” anchoring the mystery of life in rational, mechanical explanation. The impulse of the élan vital is to produce rapid changes, but could only do so, as an engine depends on fuel, if “its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from without.” For Bergson, the “impetus is finite, and it has been given once for all” already, in the early history of life on earth.96 The counter-site of Hodgson’s story, however, is a space in which a resurgence of a Life-Force and its swift-acting “flexible,” “changeable” effects on living forms can be imagined. In “The Derelict,” an energetic force as “eager” as the élan vital has apparently stimulated the rapid development of a complex organism, which may reveal some of the hidden secrets of the “essence of Life.” The doctor longs to know what the ship’s original cargo was, speculating that its content “plus the heat and time she had endured, plus one or two other only guessable quantities” was the right combination for “the chemistry of the Life-Force,” a mystery to which this monster might hold the clue (34). The old doctor laughs off the young narrator’s suggestion that a “life’s a kind of spiritual mystery” rather than a natural force

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like electricity or fire (34). He allows that there is a third “something,” required to produce life, but insists there is nothing spiritual about it. Like William Lawrence eliminating difference between a human and an oyster, the doctor mocks the possibility: “Easy, my boy! […] or I may be asking you to demonstrate the spiritual mystery of life of the limpet, or the crab” (34).97 The doctor argues that physical conditions must be as much the basis of human life as that of invertebrates, and, therefore, life could be formed of any kind of matter. The premise of the story thus asks why mammals or even invertebrates should have a monopoly on life, and consequently why any material should not have life. Numerous strands of nineteenth-century biology, as we have seen, challenged the notion that humans had a special spirit or soul, but the young narrator embodies a persisting sense that life is something immaterial. However, if humanity’s heritage from lower organisms is valid, and if the soul actually is a product of millions of souls of millions of cells, then a “spiritual mystery” cannot be true for us but not be true for limpets.98 Hodgson’s vision suggests that either all life has meaning, or none of it does. The debate between the doctor and the narrator about material and spiritual explanations of life mirror some of the debates explored in The Island of Doctor Moreau. Moreau, despite his claims to be a “religious man” uncovering “the ways of this world’s Maker” (41), seeks to prove the physiological basis of consciousness and rationality without metaphysical vitalism. For Hodgson’s doctor, the Derelict provides evidence that life itself is a product of the organisation of matter under physical forces. While recognising that living organisms can be “melted together,” as Darwin put it, however, “The Derelict” also suggests that energies and principles of the organisation of life can exist in ways that are far beyond human association or comprehension. Like “The Voice in the Night,” “The Derelict” emphasises the vitality and adaptability of monstrous forms and reconceives the organising principles of life. Although the story does not go as far as reimagining life along the mineral principles of Wells’s speculations in “Another basis for life” (1894) or the “ferromagnetics” of J.-H. Rosny aîné’s The Death of the Earth (1910), it does challenge animal bias.99 The story forms a fictional parallel to Dobell’s insight that new forms of being could exist on different principles of organisation, as well as of chemistry. Like Doctor Moreau, “The Derelict” suggests that simply reorganising familiar organic structures might produce new living forms and inform fresh understandings of the nature of organic life.

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The Derelict itself both occupies and exceeds the boundary kingdom. As a mould-like being, it may be aligned with Myxomycetes; Hurley, indeed, identifies it as a “slime-mold entity.”100 Slime moulds are colonies of prokaryote organisms, capable of collective movement. The text contains only one reference to “slimy,” however, and forty-seven uses of the word “mould” (without specifying what kind—words like “dough,” for example, are also used and suggest yeast). The Derelict is neither clearly fungus nor slime mould, but either way, its sophisticated structure positions it with the “higher” animals: “a ‘lower’ organism, mold, has attained the morphic organization of a properly higher one,” including mobility and a beating heart.101 The Derelict no longer has a deck and hull but a “skin,” and, surrounded by a “curious scum” and with “great clumpings of strange-looking sea-fungi under the bows,” this new life-form may, perhaps, be starting to reproduce (37). By collapsing distinctions between so-called “higher” and “lower” organisms, the Derelict suggests their basic similarities. Signs of the Derelict’s biologically transgressive life accumulate exuberantly as the sailors approach and board it. Up close, the vessel’s side is covered in thick, spongy mould with “a reg’lar skin to it,” suggesting the surface of a living form (40). A hole made by the captain’s foot gives a blood-like “gush of a purplish fluid” (43). Finally, the ship needs to feed. The “stuff” is soon, like a slime mould, “in active movement,” and before the sailors can escape to the boat, one man is consumed: His feet had sunk out of sight. The stuff appeared to be lapping at his legs; and abruptly his bare flesh showed. The hideous stuff had rent his trouserlegs away, as if they were paper. He gave out a simply sickening scream, and, with a vast effort, wrenched one leg free. It was partly destroyed. The next instant he pitched face downward, and the stuff heaped itself upon him, as if it were actually alive, with a dreadful savage life. (46)

Meanwhile, they hear a thudding like a giant heartbeat from within the ship, and the hull develops “ugly purple veinings […] like you will see the veins stand out on the body of a powerful full-blooded horse” (48). Finally, the captain yells out the truth: “She’s alive!” (51). The semblance of “dreadful savage life” is finally recognised as the reality. The production of this life from all three kingdoms is registered: through the Derelict’s mould and slime, its “spongy” texture, its animalian blood, heart, and skin, and its original vegetable material.

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By collapsing supposed distinctions between sophisticated and primitive organisms as well as between kingdoms, the Derelict suggests the basic similarities of all kinds of life. Like the fungus-man of “The Voice in the Night,” this entity is something new, not an evolutionary dead end but a spontaneous beginning, and evidently better suited to the ocean environment than are human sailors. The organisational complexity of the living Derelict cannot be easily explained by biological classification, natural selection, or current knowledge of the “chemistry” of life. The story attempts to represent something beyond conventional materiality. Miéville points to the weird’s “interest in the implacably alien”102 : weird fiction makes the attempt to create monsters, like the Derelict and the fungus-man, that are foreign and unknowable as far as narratively possible. Can anyone, the doctor wonders, in a moment of crisis where the fracture of his rational world-view is marked by ellipses in the text and his struggle to choose suitable words, “possibly understand our feelings in that moment… The immitigable horror of it, and the incredibleness ?” (51). How shall I make the thing more known to you? In Hodgson’s weird tales, a material universe can still contain wonders and “horrors beyond human ken and experience.”103 Exploring questions about the basis of life and humanity’s receding position within the natural order, Hodgson’s fictions of weird science take place at the extremes of scientific rationality—or just over its edge.

Conclusion The Island of Doctor Moreau, “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict” all exploit the heterotopic qualities of remote islands and uncharted ocean spaces to explore a weird worldview informed by borderlands of nineteenth-century biology. These liminal spaces form countersites in relation to the conventional known world; in them, discredited scientific ideas can be revived and marginalised theories or practices can occupy a central position. The principle that living forms are mutable underpins Hodgson’s repeated fictional imaginings of strange or monstrous creatures emerging in remote or unknown places and times, as well as Moreau’s belief that there is no reason why a human being should not be surgically created out of animals, nor why consciousness should not be produced through a process of physical transformation. Closer examination of their fiction, however, reveals that these imaginary products of scientific conjecture owe

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as much to contested or rejected strands of biological discourse, such as spontaneous generation or Lamarckian inheritance, as to those that were becoming mainstream, such as Weismann’s germ plasm or the gradual acceptance of the inadequacy of a two-kingdom taxonomy. In The Island of Doctor Moreau, humans occupy no special place in the universe and every higher function has a physiological explanation. Moreau’s vivisection project is sufficiently marginalised to require removal to his remote island, and it goes beyond the mere physical construction of humans out of animals. Through vivisection, “the bath of burning pain,” Moreau hopes to “burn out all the animal” and tap the origin of conscious, rational life which should, in theory, be dependent only on the successful reorganisation of fleshly matter. However, the ability of science to explain and control the complexity of bodily plasticity (be it mental or fleshly) is limited; even a material world is weird and can sustain incomprehensible mysteries. In “The Voice in the Night” and “The Derelict,” boundaries collapse across kingdoms of matter, not just of species, and are reconstructed into new, interstitial forms. The “boundary kingdom” of organisms proposed by nineteenth-century biologists in addition to animals and plants, and the debates these organisms engendered about the origins of life, open up a productive space for the imagining of alternative forms of life. In these counter-sites, fungus, popularly “vilified for its damage to manmade [structures] in particular,” can also stimulate development, even if that might appear grotesque.104 Hodgson’s fictions are particularly significant for their willingness to transgress biological kingdoms; where Wells focusses on the animal, Hodgson is fascinated by the organic liminality and morphic potential of cryptogams. Both writers install their tales with the sense of limitless living plasticity. The three stories imagine progenerate evolutionary possibilities, finding the weird within a materialist worldview which is prepared to acknowledge and even welcome the limits of scientific capacity and human comprehension.

Notes 1. Robert M. Philmus, “The Satiric Ambivalence of ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ (l’Ambivalence Satirique Dans ‘l’Ile Du Docteur Moreau’),” Science Fiction Studies 8, no. 1 (1981). Philmus discusses the significance of Jekyll and Hyde for Moreau, particularly in Wells’s 1895 draft, which shares “method and meaning” as “an exercise in detecting the bestial

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nature of man” with Stevenson’s novel (3). See also Anne Stiles, “Literature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 2 (2009). Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London: Gollancz, 2010), 41. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. Michael Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite (1984), 3–4; see also Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015), 132–33, for relevant discussion of heterotopia. Nick Redfern, “Abjection and Evolution in the Island of Doctor Moreau,” The Wellsian 27 (2004), 39. Payal Taneja, “The Tropical Empire: Exotic Animals and Beastly Men in the Island of Doctor Moreau,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 39, no. 2 (2013), 141. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 9. Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: Including an Autobiographical Chapter, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1888), 6. In Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 229. Barrett et al. transcribe as “netted” the word Life and Letters interprets as “melted”; however, I have chosen “melted” since it seems more consistent with the sense of the whole quotation. Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic Period Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 183; see Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay, eds., Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Joseph M. Scamardella, “Not Plants or Animals: A Brief History of the Origin of Kingdoms Protozoa, Protista and Protoctista,” International Microbiology 2, no. 4 (1999). Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, 2nd edition, trans. E. Ray Lankester (London: Kegan Paul, 1892), 45. Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western Fiction 1859–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Ian Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors, 4. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Boston: Ark Paperbacks, 1985), 13.

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16. Kelly Hurley, “The Modernist Abominations of William Hope Hodgson,” in Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 133. 17. Wilhelm Bölsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work, trans. Joseph McCabe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), 160. 18. Hesketh, Of Apes and Ancestors; Richard Noakes, “The ‘Bridge Which Is Between Physical and Psychical Research’: William Fletcher Barrett, Sensitive Flames, and Spiritualism,” History of Science (2004), xliii. 19. Arthur Machen, “The White People,” in The White People and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin, 2011), 117. 20. H. G. Wells, “The Rediscovery of the Unique,” quoted in Frank D. McConnell, The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 76. 21. McConnell, The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells, 88. 22. R. H. Hutton, “Untitled Review of the Island of Doctor Moreau. Spectator lxxvi, 519–20,” in The Island of Doctor Moreau, ed. Mason Harris (Toronto, ON: Broadview, 2009). 23. “Books of the Week,” Manchester Guardian (1896), 4; P. Chalmers Mitchell, “Mr. Wells’s ‘Dr. Moreau’,” The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art (1896), 369. 24. Harris, “Vivisection, the Culture of Science, and Intellectual Uncertainty,” 100. 25. Genie Babb, “H. G. Wells in the Borderlands: ‘The Plattner Story’ and ‘The Crystal Egg’ as Experiments in Psychical Research,” The Wellsian 35 (2012). 26. Harris, “Vivisection, the Culture of Science, and Intellectual Uncertainty,” 105. 27. Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 28. Martin Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 214. 29. Willis, Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines, 229. 30. See Michael Parrish Lee, “Reading Meat in H. G. Wells,” Studies in the Novel 42, no. 3 (2010); Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 31. H. G. Wells, “The Limits of Individual Plasticity,” in H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. David Y. Hughes and Robert M. Philmus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 36. 32. Quoted in John Farley, “The Spontaneous Generation Controversy (1859–1880): British and German Reactions to the Problem of Abiogenesis,” Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 2 (1972), 288.

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33. Wells, “Individual Plasticity,” 38–39. 34. David Y. Hughes and Robert M. Philmus, H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 18. 35. Martin Danahay, “Wells, Galton and Biopower: Breeding Human Animals,” Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 4 (2012), 474. 36. Harris, “Vivisection, the Culture of Science, and Intellectual Uncertainty,” 104. 37. Harris, “Vivisection, the Culture of Science, and Intellectual Uncertainty,” 104. 38. DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel, 131. 39. DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel, 179. 40. Dryden, The Modern Gothic, 163, 164. 41. Wells, “Individual Plasticity,” 36. 42. Hughes and Philmus, H. G. Wells: Early Writings, 184. 43. See Anne Stiles, “Literature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 2 (2009), 333; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). The term hybrid is also used by Lee, “Reading Meat in H. G. Wells”; Laura Otis, “Monkey in the Mirror: The Science of Professor Higgins and Doctor Moreau,” Twentieth Century Literature 55, no. 4 (2009). 44. For translation and discussion of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique; see Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy, trans. Hugh Elliot (London: Macmillan, 1914); Alpheus S. Packard, Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution: His Life and Work. With Translations of His Writings on Organic Evolution (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1901). 45. For full discussion of Weismann’s theories, see Ernst Mayr, “Weismann and Evolution,” Journal of the History of Biology 18, no. 3 (1985). For Lamarck’s influence on Darwin, see, e.g., Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 46. Simon Mawer, Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics (New York: Abrams, 2006); Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions. 47. Mawer, Gregor Mendel; Jonathan C. Howard, “Why Didn’t Darwin Discover Mendel’s Laws?” Journal of Biology 8 (2009). 48. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (London: John Murray, 1868). 49. Mayr, “Weismann and Evolution.” 50. Quoted in Mayr, “Weismann and Evolution,” 316. 51. H. G. Wells, “The Biological Problem of Today,” in H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, ed. David Y. Hughes and Robert M. Philmus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 126.

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52. H. G. Wells: Early Writings, 184; see also John Glendening, “‘Green Confusion’: Evolution and Entanglement in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau,” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 2 (2002). 53. Wells, “Individual Plasticity,” 36–37. 54. Wells, “Individual Plasticity,” 38. 55. H. G. Wells: Early Writings, 107. 56. Ben Woodard, Slime Dynamics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 23. 57. For discussion of the significance to Wells’s fiction of T. H. Huxley’s arguments for “ethical evolution,” see, e.g., Glendening, “‘Green Confusion’”; Steven McLean, The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 58. See, for example [Anon.], “A Tunnel of Mushrooms,” Pearson’s Magazine 5 (1865). 59. Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, 2nd edition, trans. E. Ray Lankester (London: Kegan Paul, 1892), 48. 60. John Hunter, Essays and Observations on Natural History, Anatomy, Physiology, Psychology, and Geology (London: J. Van Voorst, 1969), 16. 61. Charles Darwin, Insectivorous Plants (Wigtown: Langford, 2002), 18, 246. 62. David Moore, Fungal Biology in the Origin and Emergence of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 63. Emily Alder, “(Re)encountering Monsters: Animals in Early-TwentiethCentury Weird Fiction,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017). 64. Cheryl Blake Price, “Vegetable Monsters: Man-Eating Trees in Fin-deSiècle Fiction,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 2 (2013). 65. William Hope Hodgson, “The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’,” in The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002), 19. 66. Hodgson, “Boats,” 19. 67. Hodgson, “Boats,” 19. 68. Jeffrey Weinstock, “Introduction: Monsters Are the Most Interesting People,” in Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 2. 69. G. C. Ainsworth, Introduction to the History of Mycology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 24, 25. 70. Ainsworth, History of Mycology. 71. Moore, Fungal Biology, 6, 189. 72. Ainsworth, History of Mycology; Anton De Bary, Comparative Morphology and Biology of the Fungi, Mycetozoa and Bacteria, trans. Henry E. F. Garnsey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1887). 73. Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, trans. E. Ray Lankester (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 115. 74. De Bary, Comparative Morphology, 423.

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75. Haeckel, General Morphology of Organisms, quoted in Scamardella, “Not Plants or Animals,” 209. 76. Dobell, “The Principles of Protistology,” quoted in Scamardella, “Not Plants or Animals,” 210. 77. Ernst Haeckel, History of Creation, Vol. 2, 49. 78. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 107. 79. Anthony Camara, “Abominable Transformations: Becoming-Fungus in Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams,” Gothic Studies 16, no. 1 (2014), 10. 80. Ainsworth, History of Mycology. For discussions of debates over spontaneous generation, see also James E. Strick, Sparks of Life: Darwinism and the Victorian Debates Over Spontaneous Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); John Farley, “The Spontaneous Generation Controversy (1700–1860): The Origin of Parasitic Worms,” Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 1 (1972). 81. Ainsworth, History of Mycology; Louis Pasteur, “On the Organized Bodies Which Exist in the Atmosphere,” in Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, ed. Laura Otis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Maxime Schwartz, “The Life and Works of Louis Pasteur,” Journal of Applied Microbiology 91, no. 4 (2001). 82. Strick, Sparks of Life, 202. 83. Woodard, Slime Dynamics, 33, 36. 84. William Hope Hodgson, “The Voice in the Night,” in Men of the Deep Waters (Aegypan Press, 2006), 121. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 85. Hurley, Gothic Body, 30. 86. Hurley, Gothic Body, 30. 87. Camara, “Abominable Transformations,” 10. 88. On Darwin’s entangled bank, see Beer, Darwin’s Plots; Glendening, “‘Green Confusion’.” On embeddedness in nature lost under rational modernity, see Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), 97–100. 89. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 8. 90. Gillian Beer, “Has Nature a Future?” in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 23. 91. China Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sheryll Vint (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 512. 92. William Hope Hodgson, “The Derelict,” in Men of the Deep Waters (Aegypan Press, 2006), 34. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given in brackets in the text.

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93. See, for example, Maurice Hindle, “‘Vital Matters’: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Romantic Science,” Critical Survey 2, no. 1 (1990); Laura E. Crouch, “Davy’s A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry: A Possible Scientific Source of Frankenstein,” KeatsShelley Journal 27 (1978); C. U. M. Smith, “A Strand of Vermicelli: Dr Darwin’s Part in the Creation of Frankenstein’s Monster,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 32, no. 1 (2007); and Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 94. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 253. 95. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 254. 96. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 254. 97. Hermiona De Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 101. 98. Bölsche, Haeckel: His Life and Work. F. W. H. Myers argued similarly in Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1903), 34–38. 99. H. G. Wells, “Another Basis for Life,” in H. G. Wells: Early Writings; J.-H. Rosny aîné, “The Death of the Earth. Trans. George Slusser,” in The Xipehuz and the Death of the Earth (New York: Arno Press, 1978). 100. Hurley, Gothic Body, 36. 101. Hurley, Gothic Body, 36. 102. Miéville, “Weird Fiction,” 513. 103. Leigh Blackmore, “Things Invisible: Human and Ab-Human in Two of Hodgson’s Carnacki Stories,” Sargasso: The Journal of William Hope Hodgson Studies 1, no. 1 (2013), 184. 104. Woodard, Slime Dynamics, 27.

CHAPTER 6

Weird Energies: Physics, Futures, and the Secrets of the Universe in Hodgson and Blackwood

I turn now to my final set of weird scientific borderlands: those around energy physics. The weird tales I discuss by Blackwood and Hodgson are, on the one hand, meditations on energy and on fin-de-siècle concerns about the long-term implications of its transformations under the laws of classic thermodynamics and, on the other, explorations of emergent new ideas around rejuvenated energy arising through radioactivity and the unseen inner world of the atom. Describing an invisible concept or force that could only be known through its effects rather than directly, “energy” provided a language for conjuring non-living agency and power, a discourse for talking about interactions with the more-thanvisible world. Energy offered a way of expressing “the intuition that there is an activity, a ‘force,’ in things beyond matter in motion, that something real makes nature go.”1 The idea of energy lies behind the weird’s secular, anti-anthropocentric ontology—that the cosmos is powered by something beyond human ken and to which humans are irrelevant, and which might manifest in forms that can, at best, be only partially known on a normal sensory empirical level. The transformation of energy is a process rather than a result, happening over time on the cosmic scale as well as the local. The vastness of geological deep time extend before and after human time, and, in these tales, these are weird times, epochs in which strange new agencies flourish when humans no longer can, on the conserved energy that lies beyond the use of conventional mechanics. © The Author(s) 2020 E. Alder, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4_6

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This chapter begins by exploring how thermodynamics provided a discourse for articulating interactions with weird others through the exchange, transformation, and rejuvenations of energy forms. Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912) narrate these ideas over extensive future timelines, or abfutures; Blackwood’s “A Psychical Invasion” (1908) and “The Willows” (1907) present shortterm incidents, but all four texts evoke contemporary anxieties over heatdeath, whether on a cosmic or local level, which manifest as the ascendance of weird horrors against which human agency is vital but limited. I end by examining three stories from Blackwood’s 1907 The Listener and Other Stories —“The Willows,” “May Day Eve,” and “The Woman’s Ghost Story”—as quantum fiction, arguing that weird tales were probing some of the same strange questions about the nature of reality that later led to the emergence of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century.

New Worlds a-quiver: Energetic Realms The first John Silence story deftly illustrates how energy physics, specifically the laws of classic thermodynamics, could be deployed in the weird tale. In “A Psychical Invasion,” Silence proposes to “make an experiment with a view of drawing out this evil, coaxing it from its lair, so to speak, in order that it may exhaust itself through me and become dissipated for ever.”2 In other words, the psychic doctor will become an engine and use the second law of thermodynamics to defeat the weird invader. Efficient engines are valuable. Under the first law of thermodynamics, energy in a closed system is conserved, never lost. Under the second law, the transformations of that energy tend towards disorder or uselessness (entropy); useable energy dissipates until a state of equilibrium is reached (heat-death).3 Despite its narrative of decline, the second law was not a bad thing: it was (and is) useful. The desire to produce work from energy on its way to entropy more and more efficiently was a major driver in Victorian culture, producing what Barri Gold sees as a “qualified thermodynamic optimism” in literature as well as in science and industry.4 No matter how efficient the machine, however, it can never (actually) be perfect and entropy will always increase. Since productive energy was strongly associated with the sun (as well as with engines), concerns about energy dissipation often manifested as concerns about solar heat-death,

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incited particularly by William Thomson’s calculations that the remaining life of the sun could be numbered in mere millions of years.5 In the nineteenth-century imagination, long-term implications of the second law of thermodynamics were often expressed in vivid images of a dying sun, a frozen earth, and the extinguished stars that would ultimately comprise the universe, particularly famously in the end stages of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). As Gillian Beer summarises, “conversation among articulate Victorians about solar physics and the prospects for life on earth in a cooling solar system worked, as half-formulated anxieties will, to generate much imaginative thought and production,” while “ideas of ‘force’ and ‘energy,’ [and …] arguments concerning the age of the earth and the cooling of the sun, passed rapidly into an uncontrolled and mythologized form.”6 Weird tales, I argue, represent a particular set of interventions in this conversation, using their unique narrative mode to develop the non-human agency implied in ideas of energy and force to respond to the future prospect of heat-death as well as entropy in the present. Silence’s ability to turn his mind into an efficient psychical engine bolsters him as a reassuring, capable figure, especially compared to his evil adversary, because the instability and transformability of energy filled it with troubling possibilities. Since energy is conserved, it can only move between one form and another; a lack in one part of the system means an increase in another, as in the way Hyde, for example, increases in vitality as Jekyll decreases.7 Conservation of energy in some ways looked consoling and positive, Tina Choi observes, suggesting “a universe whose operations, while sometimes invisible, were yet always present and meaningful.”8 Energy, however, “could exist in both dynamic and potential states – it could be at times visible and active and, at others, invisible and latent and might at any moment convert from one state to another”.9 As Anna Maria Jones argues of Richard Marsh’s “The Beetle” (1897), conservation could be as frightening as dissipation when energy becomes excessive, uncontrollable, or threatening.10 The battle for survival between Silence and the psychical invader, characterised by energy transformations, demonstrates such concerns. After a first tentative incursion, or feint, the invader withdraws because Silence’s “sudden action and exhibition of energy had served to disperse it temporarily” (52). All the same, he is sure it “remained near to him, conditionally if not spatially, and was, as it were, gathering force for a second attack” (52). In its next attack, the invader generates “confused and confusing” glamours (a host of cats appears, the room’s dimensions alter),

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and now it is Silence’s energy that disperses: “a mist lay over his mind and memory; he felt dazed and his forces scattered” (62). The monster’s effects are characterised by increasing entropy and as the psychic battle wears on, the invader reveals itself in chaotic, “discarnate” form as “the wreck of a vast dark Countenance,” “ruined” and with “broken features” (63). It embodies disorder like a destroyed mechanism. Silence, on the other hand, is that impossible ideal, an engine not only of perfect efficiency through whom nothing is wasted, but able to make dissipated energy produce work. The energy itself is not evil—its qualities are dictated by the engine, or soul, using it, and thus Silence, “the soul with the good, unselfish motive, held his own against the dark discarnate woman whose motive was pure evil, and whose soul was on the side of the Dark Powers” (64). Order is associated with moral goodness, disorder with evil. Silence is so pure and efficient that he is “immune” (34) to evil intentions, which cannot harm him. Further, the invader’s energies are available for Silence to “turn them to his own account. […] he used the very power supplied by his adversary and thus enormously increased his own” (64). The invader belongs to a state of heat-death, associated with a “glacial atmosphere” and “[s]omething from the region of utter cold” (63). This energy should be unusable, yet Silence can “absorb these evil radiations into himself and change them magically into his own good purposes” (64). Silence, while establishing the credibility of an expanded understanding of the world where matter and spirit are not divided, also shows its practical usefulness; his defeat of the invader restores order and harmony by reversing the entropic process. The source of the conserved energy accessed by Silence can be considered as the more-than-visible world. This was the reasoning behind Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart’s The Unseen Universe.11 Never mind, they argued, that the “visible universe must, certainly in transformable energy and probably in matter, come to an end,” because given “the principle of Continuity upon which all such arguments are based still demanding a continuance of the universe, we are forced to believe that there is something beyond that which is visible.”12 Energy passed from the visible universe to the more-than-visible, but was not lost; rather, the Unseen Universe “recovers at another, metaphysical level all that was squandered in the ‘seen’ or material world.”13 Religion and science could thus be reconciled; considered theologically, if energy derived from the Creator, then its dissipation and conservation have purpose and nature remains under divine control.14 The idea of the Unseen Universe was received

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very critically by mainstream science, but it demonstrated how the law of conservation could reopen an ontological space for the unknown, invisible, spiritist dimensions of existence, based on making conserved energy available. Allowing for energies and forces to exist beyond the reality currently visible to us, the two laws make possible some of the most menacing and least knowable scenarios in fin-de-siècle weird fiction. But this was also an era in which classical physics was increasingly being challenged. Nineteenth-century science may generally have been prevailingly empiricist, but the theoretical emphasis of physics was already different.15 Physics dealt with particles too small to be seen and with new concepts and terminology such as forces and atoms, while the concept of the medium of the ether permeated everything.16 Psychical research’s use of ideas about unseen transformations and transmissions of energy made it hard to distinguish one sort of unobservable force from another.17 “Surely the concept of a nerve-force is no more difficult than that ‘of the inner mechanism of the atom’,” William Crookes complained in 1871, since both were invisible and hypothetical.18 The new physics redefined the relationship between energy and matter as perhaps one and the same thing, a possibility compounded by the discovery of X-rays in the 1890s and further experiments with radioactive elements such as radium. On the borderlands of familiar science, the discoveries and uncertainties of fin-de-siècle physics produced a new space for the weird, particularly since the possibilities were changing and unfolding quite rapidly. By the 1900s, assumptions that conserved energy could never be turned to any use were being overturned by discoveries such as those made in radioactivity by the research of Ernest Rutherford and Frederick Soddy. Understanding the sun’s power as a process of nuclear fusion, rather than the burning of a coal fire, radically altered the narrative and length of the sun’s future. Soddy explained in an 1908 lecture that “[r]adium has taught us that there is no limit to the amount of energy in the world available to support life, save only the limit imposed by the boundaries of knowledge.”19 For Soddy, nature was full of untapped sources of energy. Not for nothing does Joshua Glenn describe speculative fiction of 1904– 1933 as “the radium age.”20 The early twentieth century saw what is often described as a revolution in physics, and a turn towards Einsteinian physics and quantum theory, relating to long-standing puzzles such as the nature of light. Established

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as wave-like, light was also shown to behave like particles—an unexplainable paradox under classical physics, even by the ether. Max Planck’s proposal that energy was released in the form of discrete packets (quanta) in 1900 and Einstein’s 1905 paper on photoelectric effect began to address the problem.21 By the mid-1920s, the work of Heisenberg, Bohr, and others suggested a quantum world which possessed no continuity with the everyday world.22 Quantum theory and the weird share parallels in their description and representation. The quantum world is counter-intuitive compared to our experience of the everyday world, difficult to grasp and impossible to visualise in the normal way. John Polkinghorne, for example, uses the words “cloudy” and “fitful” to describe quantum reality, language reminiscent of the irreducible, unknowable state of the weird.23 Internally, atoms’ structure and behaviour could not be explained in the conventional ways. If a quantum description of the atom is “radically unimaginable,”24 the step from it to weird unspeakability is small. Newtonian physics understood the world as determinable, certain, and uniform, but Planck’s discovery of the “quantum of action,” Niels Bohr wrote in 1929, “brought about a complete revision of the foundations underlying our description of natural phenomena.”25 That revision included a departure from absolute determinacy towards probability.26 The quantum world is statistically describable, but not causally predictable; as Bohr summarised, we have been forced step by step to forgo a causal description of the behaviour of individual atoms in space and time, and to reckon with a free choice on the part of nature between various possibilities to which only probability considerations can be applied.27

In a quantum state, particles potentially exist in multiple locations, only resolving into an answer when you go looking for it (and depending on what answer you look for). Such superposition “permits the mixing of states that classically would be mutually exclusive of each other.”28 The realities of the weird, too, as we have seen, often depend on accepting radical new versions of physical laws as well as their multiplicities or uncertainties. As I have been arguing, weird tales develop, and could only have developed, from the 1880s and 1890s onwards and concurrently with changing conditions in scientific theory, practice, and philosophy. Rachel Crossland

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and Susan Strehle have shown how works of writers from Woolf to Pynchon engage with these early to mid-twentieth-century transformations of physical science and philosophy, while Christina Scholz traces direct affinities between the notion of “quantum fiction” arising in the 1990s and weird fiction itself.29 My objects of discussion here, however, are early twentieth-century stories. While they post-date Röntgen rays and Planck’s theory of quanta, they significantly pre-date the wider acceptance and theorisations of quantum theory of the 1920s. But all arise out of nineteenthcentury physics.30 Egil Asprem makes the point that “attempts to understand matter in terms of ether or even electromagnetism resulted from physical models based on mathematical formalisations, theory-building, and the challenge of puzzling experimental data” for decades preceding the establishment of quantum theory,31 and Gold argues that Victorian texts anticipate twentieth-century physics through their “creative use of entropy” (as, too, does, “A Psychical Invasion”).32 Weird tales work with ideas that had undergone widespread specialist and popular discussion through the century as well as new discoveries and propositions which, like X-rays, quickly gripped the imagination. As a result, what weird tales sometimes end up describing is something resembling a quantum world as much as it does a thermodynamic one. The very fact they cannot (as physicists and Theosophists and others generally could not) reconcile the potentials of the new ideas with established classical conventions encapsulates the historical moment of transition and overlap between one way of understanding the nature of the universe and another: the classical, Newtonian, quotidian, empirical experience of the world, and the new, quantum, weird, hidden theoretical reality of it. The juxtaposition is not easy or comfortable in either the science or the fiction of the period; the two states don’t intuitively sit together and yet they are mixed. Weird fictions like “The Willows” and The Night Land don’t sort their science either, but instead present storyworlds that are weird because they are woven tapestries of science, metaphysics, occultism, imagination, and genre tropes. I explore how Blackwood and Hodgson present their stories’ strange, monstrous encounters and phenomena thermodynamically, like energy movements, intersecting with metaphysical and occult extrapolations of thermodynamics to explain unseen dimensions and weird entities. Since the ideas of these forces and currents are modern—depending on nineteenth-century discourses of electricity and energy and atoms and

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forces—they aren’t assimilable to past traditions of supernatural or mythical monstrosity. A number of Blackwood’s stories present weird storyworlds that are strikingly similar to how quantum realities are described later. These realities are (still) so strange compared to everyday experience that arguably, in this period, they could only happen in weird fiction. Or, to put it the other way around, the describing of realities in quantum-like ways is what makes this fiction weird in the first place.

Energetic Abfutures: The House on the Borderland and The Night Land The House on the Borderland and The Night Land present weird multidimensional universes in which dreadful powers lurk outside the normal world and in abfutures beyond normal human time scales. Both are tales of solar heat-death combined with a romance of eternal love that ponder what a meaningful human existence might be against a vast cosmological timeline. Like Blackwood’s stories discussed later, as well as powering the weird with nineteenth-century thermodynamic discourses, these Edwardian-era tales are also marked by transformative theoretical concepts not available in the 1890s. Mark Blacklock contends that “Hodgson’s work could not come before the n-dimensional turn and accordingly ‘other’ dimensional spaces recur in his work, signifying the cosmological immensity of space and represented as a source of terror.”33 Between their conjuring of incomprehensible weird terrors and their depictions of dark entropic futures, the novels associate, like “The Willows,” weird affect with transformations of time, space, and matter. The novels play with borderland science—ideas about other planes of existence drawn from the occult revival and mathematics, the psychic forces that could explain telepathy and spiritual communication, radioactivity and the possibility of energy’s rejuvenation. Darryl Jones describes The House on the Borderland as a compendium of occult and spiritualist themes and ideas, from the twoworlds hypothesis and astral journeys of the spiritualists, to the Theosophical “Esoteric Buddhism” of Madame Blavatsky and Alfred Percy Sinnet, to the Occult Celtism of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.34

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A similar claim can be made for The Night Land, in which telepathy and reincarnation play a large part in the story’s central romance. To this compendium I add energy physics. The interplay between physics and occultism allows construction of weird ontological visions of remarkable scope across time, space, and other dimensions. Both novels, especially The Night Land, are notorious for what critics often call “flaws” of writing style, sentimentality, and genre collision. As Gary Wolfe explains, some see the astral journey in The House on the Borderland as “an almost fatal flaw in an excellent horror novel, while others have viewed it as a passage of visionary genius weakened by the tawdry Gothic tale that surrounds it.”35 Hodgson, however, “conceived of his novel as a unity” and “sought to provide […] a cosmological superstructure for the obsessive horror” of his work.36 Reading the novels as weird offers a way, perhaps the only way, to understand them as unities. The House on the Borderland In both novels, the death of the sun propels Hodgson’s characters into dark abfutures not intended for humans to inhabit. The two novels are among a number of fin-de-siècle eschatological fictions about the death of the sun, which, if not already a black cinder, is almost always depicted as red like a fading fire or a sunset. In George Wallis’s “The Last Days of Earth” (1901), the last humans, Celia and Alwyn, survey a range of locations around the globe, and in “every daylight scene, the pale ghost of a dim, red sun hung in a clear sky.”37 In Camille Flammarion’s Omega (1894), “[t]he sun will become a dark red ball, then a black one, and night will be perpetual”; in The Time Machine, “the sun, red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome glowing with a dull heat”; and The Night Land’s stilling sun “made a red gloom for a thousand miles,” heralding “the utter twilight of the world.”38 Blackwood’s “The Willows,” too, contains a number of images of a setting or vanishing sun. The sun is associated with human life and flourishing, its loss with extinction. Thermodynamic calculations essentially treated it like a fire burning up its fuel, which, along with sunsets, explains the invariable redness of dying suns. According to William Thomson in 1887, it was “exceedingly rash to assume as probable anything more than twenty million years of the sun’s light in the past history of the earth, or to reckon on

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any more than five or six million years of sunlight for time to come.”39 Time might be infinite but the sun, at least in the late nineteenth century, was demonstrably not. Nineteenth-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann observed that the “general struggle for existence of animate beings” was really a struggle for energy’s useable transformations: “a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.”40 When that process ceases, so does the world’s hospitability to animate beings (though not necessarily to weird ones). In the night-time following solar heat-death, there is no prospect of a saving sunrise as there is in “The Willows.” The difference between x millions of years and the infinity of time dictates that the coming night not only lasts for ever, but also is all there is and ever has been (since infinity minus x million is still arithmetically infinite). In “The Garden of Proserpine” (1866), Algernon Charles Swinburne imagined the entropic world as dark and motionless: Then star nor sun shall waken, Nor any change of light Nor sound of waters shaken, Nor any sound or sight: Nor wintry leaves nor vernal, Nor days nor things diurnal; Only the sleep eternal In an eternal night.41

Swinburne’s cold, still, dark world is temporally alien and empirically unknowable, definable, like other weird conditions, only by what it is not. That is, except for the “eternal night,” a refrain that echoes through tales of solar heat-death and encapsulates its dread. “Light!” cries the Recluse in The House on the Borderland, “One must spend an eternity wrapped in soundless night, to understand the full horror of being without it” (177).42 “The future was eternal night,” writes Flammarion in Omega, while in The Night Land, as “Eternal Night lengthened itself upon the world, the power of terror grew and strengthened” (329). In these tales, “last man” figures face eternal night and have the opportunity to find out and report on what the extinction of human consciousness might mean. The vision of an eternity of darkness expresses the horror of stasis and equilibrium along with the horror of an infinite universe—in other

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words, the horror of energy unusable to humans in a time and space they cannot belong to, which form ideal conditions for the weird. The darkness following solar heat-death—if there was really nothing else to hope for—had troubling epistemological implications: How is a motionless, energy-less world to be known or understood? This was not a question anyone needed to worry about pragmatically, but it ties the imagined eternal night of the future to the epistemological concerns of the present. George Levine, discussing responses to the changing epistemological bases of nineteenth-century science, notes that “like their most obvious antagonists, Huxley and the naturalists shared the terror of ‘darkness,’ ‘madness,’ and ‘moral chaos’ that would come if no foundation for knowledge were found.”43 The fear of the heat-dead universe is a moral fear and one that the weird taps, generating worlds that cannot be explained on any known foundation, and in which weird things on the unknowable dark edges of human reality draw closer. Weird tales, however, don’t succumb to gloom entirely, but also look for new possibilities or formulations of energy, from the sun, or at least a sun, or from the more-than-visible world, again taking their cue from physics and its occult versions. William Thomson, unwilling to condemn the universe to eternal night, left open the loophole of whether “sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation,” and, as we have seen, The Unseen Universe offered another way to account for where the energy “goes” that might leave hope.44 Bruce Clarke traces a line of ideas through James Clerk Maxwell and The Unseen Universe to Isis Unveiled (1877), in which Madame Blavatsky “appropriated the recuperative side of Tait and Stewart’s arguments at the point that the invisible world recovers the spilt energy of the material world and so stocks its celestial coffers with eternal potency.”45 Blavatsky brought alternative myths of the sun into dialogue with Western science to offer new forms of energetic salvation. The “Occultists of the East,” Blavatsky explained, posited a “Central Sun” as “the centre of Universal life-Electricity […] the one attracting, as also the ever-emitting, life Centre.”46 In this formulation, the Central Sun is a sort of perpetual motion machine, an eternal source of the energy of life. Weird and sf tales of this period embrace solar perpetuity as much as its heat-death. In The House on the Borderland and in Frank Lillie Pollock’s “Finis” (1906), the mythical “Central Sun” of the universe is shown to exist. In Pollock’s story, that sun is “so inconceivably remote that perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands of years would elapse before its light should

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burst upon the solar system.”47 When it does, life on earth is consumed by the immense heat. In The House on the Borderland, the Recluse’s lengthy passage through time takes him well beyond the death of our sun and onwards towards the Central Sun, a journey that produces new revelations, both consoling and terrifying. In this way, the novel negotiates weird cosmological alternatives to the philosophically unacceptable prospect of eternal night. The novel purports to be a manuscript discovered by two young men on holiday in rural Ireland, whose own story is further framed by an “editor”: Hodgson. The main story is that of a long-dead man known only as the Recluse. The framing, as well as clues within the text to how the events might seem different to the Recluse’s sister and housekeeper Mary, encourages doubts about the story’s authenticity and the Recluse’s sanity.48 All the same, the manuscript, found near the site of the eponymous house which has long since collapsed into a ravine, tells the story of events befalling its resident: the house apparently sat on the borderland between this world and some other, horrifying dimension. The Recluse writes of his battles with green pig-like monsters attempting to invade his home, while between these struggles, he experiences dream-like astral journeys that take him firstly to an analogue of his house in a vast arena surrounded by monstrous pantheistic gods, including Set and Kali, and secondly through aeons of time and space to the end of the universe and the Central Sun. Before the Recluse can enter this weird abfuture, the known present must fall away. Time speeds up, as he sits reading in his study; the hands on his clock buzz and the sun and moon whip around the world ever faster into streams of day and night. The sequence bears more than a passing resemblance to what Wells’s Time Traveller views from his time machine, but the Recluse travels much further.49 His sleeping dog crumbles to dust, and he himself ages before awakening to discover his own “ages-dead” corpse under a shroud of “grave-powder” (170). Dust, suggests Oliver Tearle, “is a far-reaching thing,” used in The House on the Borderland to signal “the passing of time, and the death that will come to all living beings.”50 The Recluse is conveniently left as “a bodyless thing,” an etheric body or immortal spirit watching as “time winged on through eternity” (170–1) and the sun wanes to “a vast dead disk, rimmed with a thin circle of bronze-red light” (175) before finally going out. Yet this is not the end of time. Through the technique of the dreamvision, the Recluse is in a position to witness what “no living man can

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ever have known” (175): the eternal night after the death of the sun, tantamount to entering a weird outer dimension. He feels all the existential distress that would cause, realising, “despairingly, that the world might wander forever, through that enormous night. For awhile, the unwholesome idea filled me, with a sensation of overbearing desolation” (176). Light never wholly vanishes from the sky, though, and, gradually, a flaming green star emerges and consumes the dead sun. From here, the Recluse’s experience grows less astronomical and more mystical, shifting from an account of entropic decay into a search for ultimate meaning. His soul passes over a “boundless river of softly shimmering globes,” and he grows “conscious of a new mystery about me, telling me that I had, indeed, penetrated within the borderland of some unthought of region – some subtle, intangible place, or form, of existence” (183). The Recluse is reunited with the soul of his dead love in the “silent, spacious void” and the “quiet waters of the Sea of Sleep” (184). Here (as also in The Night Land, in which the “Country of Silence” is the lowest level of the pyramid and where the civilisation’s dead are disposed), silence and sleep resonate closely with death, trances, and the possibility of access to borderland realms. The spirit of the mesmerised subject, Blavatsky claims, “quits its paralyzed earthly casket,” and the gates of the portal which marks the entrance to the “silent land” are now but partially ajar; they will fly wide open before the soul of the entranced somnambulist only on that day when, united with its higher immortal essence, it will have quitted forever its mortal frame.51

The clairvoyant’s spirit can obtain a glimpse of the “silent land,” but only the souls of the dead may enter. The Recluse meets his lost beloved, but the reunion is transient; he is not a dead soul but a “bodyless thing,” temporarily existing on the cusp of life and death. Like Machen’s Mary and Nesbit’s Roger, the Recluse glimpses secrets of the cosmos beyond the limitations of conventional conceptions of time and existence. They are mainly along Theosophic lines: “Intra-Cosmic motion is eternal and ceaseless,” Blavatsky declared, “cosmic motion (the visible, or that which is subject to perception) is finite and periodical.”52 The Recluse has watched normal cosmic motion cease, and now what the eternal cosmos is really like is revealed. He notices a “countless profusion” of “moving sparks” he thinks are “messengers from the Central Sun” (186). The Central Sun indeed emits energy, like a stream of atomic

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particles, and he wonders if he has “come upon the dwelling place of the Eternal” (186). These truths are beyond what the Recluse can cope with—as he tries to decipher what it all means, his ability to describe his experience breaks down: Huge, vague thoughts had birth within me. I felt, suddenly, terribly naked. And an awful Nearness, shook me. And Heaven! … Was that an illusion? My thoughts came and went, erratically. (186)

The secrets of time and the universe are partially unlocked for the Recluse, but at crucial moments he cannot make sense of or process what he is experiencing, nor even describe it. The failure of text and language to represent the other reality keeps it veiled in shadows, refracted through gaps and silences. The Recluse enters a weird dimension of wondrous answers to spiritual and physical mysteries, but they are only partially comprehensible and his experiences remain tied to the real, contemporary world and the horror of the invading Swine-creatures. His return to his own time takes him once more past the House in the Arena, revealing that his own house is key to everything he has (or thinks he has) experienced. Darryl Jones identifies the House, or rather the Pit over which it is built, as an omphalos, the “divine navel” or “geomantic centre point, locus of the convergence of occult forces, a singularity of spiritual creation or force” (the ancient forts and Celtic temples of Arthur Machen represent others).53 The omphalos is a variety of rip in the world-weave, through which things peer—in this case, the Swine-creatures, always “searching for an ingress into the House” (123). At the omphalos of the House distinctions between realities collapse, the Recluse battles the Swine-creatures around the real house, or at least that much of it that is still (mostly) in his world. He also sees them from the other side during his journey past the House in the Arena, analogue for his own: “over its walls crawled a legion of unholy things, almost covering the old building […] they were the Swine-creatures” (180). These views of the Swine-creatures from the other side of the boundary identify the Pit and the House as the links between dimensions. He realises that the two houses are “en rapport,” and that when he fought off the pigs from the terrestrial house, he had also protected the other house

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(189). Actions in the terrestrial here and now, it seems, have corresponding effects in the abfuture time and place and therefore may not be not futile after all.54 The Recluse’s visionary sequences bring him close to barely graspable truths about the nature of the universe. Between these revelations, reunion with his love, and the horror of the Swine-creatures, the cosmos of The House on the Borderland is a weird ontological expression of wonder and terror. The astral journeys and the invasions from the Pit together constitute a search for the meaning that lies beyond the physical world, which take the ambivalent weird form of both inexplicable horror and spiritual consolation. Energy is not lost in Hodgson’s vision; the energy of the universe is far greater than what is visible in the solar system and contains, in the Central Sun, a perpetual source. The Night Land The Night Land is a fantasy of eternal love despite the entropic trajectory of the arrow of time. It shares some impulses with The House on the Borderland, but builds an entire world in its sun-dead abfuture, populated by a full weird complement of corporeal monsters and immaterial entities. Millions of years after the death of the sun, the remnants of humanity live in an eight-mile-high pyramid, the Great Redoubt, protected from the darkness of the surrounding Night Land and the horrors it contains. The novel begins as a medieval love story, but in the second chapter moves to the future world and the narrator’s quest across the Night Land to save his beloved Naani (they are both reincarnations) from the destruction of her own Lesser Redoubt. The Night Land itself is an intensely weird environment of strange evolutionary paths, weakened dimensional boundaries, incomprehensible terrors, and wondrous powers. To attain this vision, The Night Land creates an impossible abfuture out of the incompatible projections set out by evolutionary theory and thermodynamics. To play out the survival of the human race alongside the mortality of the solar system, it has to negotiate a discrepancy between the age of the earth as calculated by Thomson in the 1880s and as defined by geologists and evolutionists like Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin earlier in the century. The gradual process of evolution required not millions but hundreds of millions years for the changes observed in species and rocks to take place. However, as Fiona Stafford remarks, even “if Darwin and Thomson regarded their theories as mutually incompatible, imaginative

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writers were able to draw on both in the creation of nightmarish visions of the future” and compound the anxieties they generated into a single myth.55 The Time Machine, for example, stretches Thomsonian time to enable Darwinian evolution to take place and in doing so “renders a thirty million-year future thinkable.”56 Hodgson deals with it by killing off the sun relatively early on and setting most of the geological, astronomic, and evolutionary action afterwards. By using a reasonably Thomsonsian time frame, the prospect of what it means to exist after the death of the sun is brought imaginatively closer. The usual existential buffer between us and “eternal night” wears thin, and we can hear the scratching on the other side as the weird things of the Night Land press through. The Great Redoubt protects humans from hostile species as well as a hostile environment. The Night Land outside the pyramid is not the planet’s frozen surface, but somewhere deep in the earth’s crust nearer its remaining volcanic activity. Here, the Great Redoubt taps a telluric power called the Earth-Current. This augments the fortress by powering an Electric Circle around the pyramid that stops abominable monsters getting too close, fuelling weapons, and lighting the Underground Fields: “All of the Underground Land was lit, where needed, by the Earth-Current, and that same life-stream fructified the soil, and gave life and blood to the plants and to the trees, and to every busy and natural thing” (335). The Earth-Current is not only a substitute for sunlight, but is in many ways superior to it—it directly energises living creatures and maintains the people’s psychic and moral health. The reincarnation of X into a future man whose physical, spiritual, and psychical condition is far superior to that of people of the ordinary fin-de-siècle world is a working out of Blavatsky’s notions that “[t]he whole order of nature evinces a progression towards a higher life” and that “every ‘Spirit’ so-called is either a disembodied or a future man.”57 Hodgson’s enweirded version is tied not just to spiritual betterment but to a tangible physical cause, so that human evolution follows adaptation to a change in environment—in this case close proximity to the earth’s core and thus to the Earth-Current. The Earth-Current is evidently a version of Vril from Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 The Coming Race, a tale of a superior underground civilisation.58 Vril is itself a kind of electrical, magnetic, mesmeric fluid that unites the various “natural energetic agencies.”59 From this all-purpose power source, the Vril-ya “extract the light which supplies their lamps, finding it steadier, softer, and healthier than the other inflammable materials” (65). Vril “can replenish or invigorate life, heal, and preserve” and

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also promotes telepathic communication (65). Hodgson’s Earth-Current fulfils the same functions (enhancing X’s capacity to interact psychically with Naani, for example) while its source is more explicitly physical. The concept of telluric currents—currents of electricity flowing through the earth’s core, for which “earth current” was a common alternative term— was well established by the 1890s, and they were understood to relate to the earth’s geomagnetic fields.60 “[T]he globe of the earth is considered to be traversed by electric currents parallel to the magnetic equator” notes an 1858 Handbook of Natural Philosophy among a list of theories of magnetism, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London contain several discussions of earth-currents and their effect on telegraph wires and needles.61 The physics and applications of magnetism and electricity were far from fully understood, but were invoked, as we have seen, in a number of borderland scientific capacities. In The Night Land, the capacity to use and control the Earth-Current’s energy is what ensures humanity’s survival, in an answer to the way Vril supports the Vril-ya’s destiny as the Coming Race to take humanity’s place. Presenting “a conception of evolution more vitalist than mechanical,” Susan Stone-Blackburn argues, “both supports Lytton’s conception of magic (or psi) as natural and gives the human will a part to play in the direction of evolution.”62 Human agency was a key element in secular resistance of the bleak implications of a materialist universe. T. H. Huxley called the relentless mechanisms of the universe, such as entropy and evolution, the “cosmic process.” He argued that “the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it” in a process of “ethical evolution.”63 Huxley saw “no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by sound principles of investigation, and organized in the common effort, may modify the conditions of existence for a period longer than that now covered by history.”64 To an extent, the Great Redoubt’s people have operated this Huxleian model, controlling their physical, moral, and psychical development through use of the Earth-Current and circumventing the degeneration into simpler forms that would represent “adaptation to an universal winter” after solar heat-death.65 Essential to ethical evolution would be social order: “Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process and reminding the individual of his duty to the community.”66 Only shared effort and commitment to the common good would produce the necessary organisation and efficiency—and “the doctrine of efficiency had

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become the new century’s version of a spiritual and moral regeneration” by the 1900s.67 In The Night Land, society itself becomes an efficient machine, a realm of order in contrast to the monstrous chaos outside. As X observes, reflecting on the strictures of his home, “each must to his duty to the security and well-being of the Redoubt” (332), relinquishing certain freedoms. The Great Redoubt is consequently a highly ordered society of strict rules and severe punishments.68 Its psychical and ethical health is maintained by the Earth-Current: adaptive rewards include the fact that everyone is “advanced more in spiritual sight and hearing than the normal Peoples of this [the earlier] Age” (365) and share a “unity of sympathy,” transmitted through the ether, that supports X during his journey (383). The people are also careful to avoid “wasting” the Earth-Current (only using certain powerful weapons in direst need, for example). Energy, social order, and efficiency are all inherently connected, associated with the human world while chaos is associated with the weird. Accordingly, the example of the Lesser Redoubt shows the consequences of the failure of the boundary between the two. There, when the EarthCurrent supply fails, the people degenerate and weaken: an Evil Force had made action upon the Peoples within the Lesser Redoubt; so that some being utter weak by reason of the failing of the Earth-Current, had opened the Great Door, and gone forth into the night. And immediately there had come into the Lesser Pyramid, great and horrid monsters, and had made a great and brutish chase. (466)

Without the Earth-Current, entropic disorder ensues and rationality is disrupted. Naani later describes her failure to draw any other survivors together: “they ran, with no heed to their callings that she did be human, even as they; and by this it is plain the sore and dreadful panic that was upon the hearts of such” (467). Fear is a powerful entropic force in the Night Land, generating increased disorder that enables weird terrors to flourish and human being to dissipate. The Night Land is replete with species and entities that flourish in this entropic world while humanity wanes. Despite the darkness, there is enough volcanic heat and water to support a remarkable range of organic life: bushes and trees, giant Slug-Beasts, aggressive Humped Men, “Things and Beast-Monsters” (372) and even the occasional harmless herbivore. Some of these species are received as abominable products of

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the world’s decay, and some are naturally evolved to suit the new environmental conditions.69 Both sets of creatures contrast to the humans who know their days are numbered and spend their time in “quiet watching for the day when the Earth-Current shall become exhausted.” The Night Land is also populated by even stranger things, “fresh and greater monsters” that are “attracted” like “Infernal sharks” to the pyramid, yet repelled by its light (329). There are many such terrors in the Night Land—the House of Silence that lures unwary humans inside to their destruction and shines with its own malevolent light, the mountain-sized Watchers encircling the pyramid. A few equally inexplicable Powers of Goodness occasionally intercede to protect human wanderers, but most entities are hostile. Andy Robertson dubs these monsters “pneumavores”—soul-eaters—emphasising that even if they have come from another dimension or cosmos, they are natural entities, not demonic or supernatural, in other words, the epitome of a weird monster.70 Some pneumavores have their origin in scientific meddling, which has exposed a weird, multidimensional reality. “Olden sciences,” the narrator, X, tells us, which, disturbing the unmeasurable Outward Powers, had allowed to pass the Barrier of Life some of those Monsters and Ab-human creatures, which are so wondrously cushioned from us at this normal present. And thus there had materialised, and in some cases developed, grotesque and horrible Creatures, which now beset the humans of this world. And where there was no power to take on material form, there had been allowed to certain dreadful Forces [the] power to affect the life of the human spirit. (328)

Revealed is not a benign spirit world or transcendental astral plane, but etheric realms from which strange things look in and sometimes pass through, drawn to human spiritual energies. Among the legends X reports are the “secret and horrid Doorways In The Night” I mentioned in Chapter 1, concluded to represent “ruptures of the Æther” visible to the spirit but “hid to the eyes of the flesh” (398). He encounters such a doorway himself: “a door […] opened upward there; for the noise did grow in such a wise as you shall hear a distant sound come through […] outward from some far lost and foreign Eternity” (400). The Sound, “ever more loud,” makes him “sicken to an utter weakness of body and heart” and “near totter to my face thrice, so weak gone was I” (400). Through

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ruptures detectable only by the spirit, weird energies increase while X’s weakens. Watched by outside forces, the people of the Great Redoubt are, in their turn, fascinated by the “black monstrosity” of the Night Land and watch it continually: “on none did it ever come with weariness to look out upon all the hideous mysteries” (324). They face Eugene Thacker’s “world-without-us,” a “zone that is at once impersonal and horrific” and confronts us with our own limits.71 The weird things look in, people look back, horrified, yet compelled. The natural barrier is thin, and relative safety lies only behind the double fortress of Great Pyramid and Electric Circle. Those who cross the limits and venture into the Night Land risk their souls as well as their physical lives. In The Night Land, soul or spirit itself becomes an energy source to compete for. Spiritual eternity is central to The Night Land’s story, as it is to The House on the Borderland. In both, eternal love is as possible as eternal night. Hodgson’s abfutures suggest that human agency is cosmologically small but not futile, even while it must recognise its limits and ultimately yield the lost energetic world to weird others.

“Heat from a Magical Source”: Blackwood, Energy, and Quantum Weird Algernon Blackwood’s writings also deal with frightening and destructive, awesome and transcendental, and unruly and energetic powers. The potentialities of energy—physically, creatively, and spiritually—are closely aligned with the power of Nature, conceived in his philosophy almost as a being with its own agency. In his autobiography Episodes Before Thirty (1923), Blackwood explained that It is difficult to put into intelligible, convincing words the irresistible character of this Nature-spell that invades heart and brain like a drenching sea, and produces a sense of rapture, of ecstasy, compared to which the highest conceivable worldly joy becomes merely insipid […]. Heat from this magical source was always more or less present in my mind from a very early age.72

The Nature-spell, crucially, is energetic. It invariably, whether destructively or transcendentally, infuses Blackwood’s characters with the power of “this magical source” of “heat.” In some stories, weird energies are

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literally hot and fiery; Defago in “The Wendigo” is afflicted by “burning feet of fire” and O’Hara in “The Heath Fire” becomes one with the flames.73 Michelle Poland, discussing Blackwood’s 1912 short story collection Pan’s Garden, argues that these storyworlds operate according to a “chaos ecology,” presenting, following Philippe Borgeaud, as a “Panic landscape.”74 “Pan-ic” also describes the state reached by Blackwood’s characters as they become immersed in a chaotic landscape and a transformed psyche.75 Thermodynamically, “chaos” and “disorder” have the slightly different meanings already explained, describing energy that has become unavailable. Unavailable, that is, for human use, which may help explain why a weird flood of uncontrollable energy is so alarming, or “Panic.” If energy unusable by humans is available, and increasingly so, for use by other entities somewhere else in the system, that can only mean human power and control in the world is diminishing—unless the need for it is relinquished as Bittacy, Defago, and O’Malley do. “The Willows” negotiates the same dilemma: Can human limits in knowledge and mastery be recognised without resulting in existential destruction, a symbolic heat-death? The answer may be yes, but only just. “The Willows” In “The Willows,” based on a trip Blackwood took with a friend in summer 1900, the narrator and his Swedish companion journey the Danube in a Canadian canoe.76 Stuck for two nights in their camp on a shrinking island between the willows and a flooding river, they are terrorised overnight by inhuman forces, and only narrowly escape. “The Willows” exemplifies Blackwood’s philosophy of expanded awareness of the world writ weird. The normal elements of water, sun, and wind grow powerful and threatening, and, if that wasn’t bad enough, the pair have strayed into a place where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin.77

If the Swede’s speculations here are right, weird entities veiled by the willows look in from somewhere outside the system. They bring with

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them, and seem to relish, chaos and disorder, and disrupt normal energy transformations. In the text, the energetic hostility of the environment is linked to that of the “willows,” as is the final hour escape from both. The Danube is presented as excessively energised, a living entity, and resistant to human domination. The river is a “huge fluid being” that “impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness ” (131). It resembles “some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul” (131). It possesses agency of its own as it “slips beyond the control of stern banks” and “wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels” (128). Officially, this living landscape is designated “a deserted area” (127), a blank blue area on the map “growing fainter in colour as it leaves the banks,” labelled “in large straggling letters [with] the word Sümpfe, meaning marshes” (127). The entropy and lassitude of the riverland’s anthropocentric construction as a “desolation” and a “desert” (and the narrator later calls it a “waste”), however, contrasts with its evident energy. Symbolic cartographic governance “straggles” and “grows faint” in the effort to fix and define the changeable waterscape. Nothing stays still in this swampy region; the willows are “so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive” (127, italics original). On this stretch, the waters “spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel” (127). The effect of this dissipation, however, is to increase rather than diminish the work produced; the river waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks […] and forming new islands innumerable which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life since the flood-time obliterates their very existence. (128)

The delta-like river plain spills over with proliferating energy that continually creates and destroys. The two travellers move at the whim of the water; their canoe is “twisted like a cork,” “leap[s] like a spirited horse,” and “plunges on yellow foam” (129) until they are all but thrown up on the banks of the willow-grown island where they will spend two terrible nights. The narrator quickly feels a sense of unease and distress that he connects with both the “unrestrained power of the elements” (specifically the water, the “shouting hurricane” of the wind, and the sun’s heat) and

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with the “dense array” of willows that seem to be “watching, waiting, listening” (137). In counterpoint to the energy and agency of the willows, the river, and the elements is the lassitude of the men and their struggle to act productively. After landing, the two men lie on hot sand “in the full blaze of a scorching sun,” while the willow bushes are “dancing, shouting, […] shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands” (130). The Swede promptly falls asleep, while the narrator “wander[s] about in a desultory examination” of the island, impeded by the dense bushes (135). The shouts of a passing boatman are “drowned” by the wind (25). Discussing what they suppose had been a superstitious warning, the Swede’s conviction is “lacking” while the narrator struggles to cover his discomfort by “trying to make as much noise as I could” (142). Meanwhile, the wind strikes the island with explosive sounds and “great flat blows of immense power” (143); sparks from the fire “flew overhead like fireworks,” while the “scarcity of wood made it a business to keep the fire going” even as the wind’s draught accelerates the speed of the burning (144). Ultimately, the narrator concedes that “[t]he long day’s battle with wind and water – such wind and such water! – had tired us both,” yet neither of them can really be bothered to move to go to bed (144–5). These are just a few examples of how the two men’s useable energy is shown as depleted or depleting at this point, while the wind increases, the fuel burns, and the water rises. More worrying, however, is the increase of mental entropy that follows the physical, brought about by their fear. Overnight, the narrator is awed by glimpses of moving, fluid shapes in the darkness, which gives way to fear and a realisation of “how helpless I was to achieve anything really effective” (155). In the morning, the narrator observes the willows have moved closer to the tent, “[c]reeping with silent feet over the shifting sands. […] There was a suggestion here of personal agency, of deliberate intention, of aggressive hostility, and it terrified me into a sort of rigidity” (160). The willows’ movements are mirrored by his paralysis. Later, his fear is a “dead weight” (177) and “icy” (194). Terror equates to energy loss, marked by its gain elsewhere in the system, in this case by the willows, which have their own ways of using energy, giving them “a sort of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred” (173). The willow bushes are a relatively identifiable source of concern, but they cannot explain other frights: neat funnels in the sand, a missing paddle and food, a tear in the canoe, and, most oddly, that the blade of the

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remaining paddle is “beautifully scraped […] so thin that the first vigorous stroke must have snapped it off” (166). The narrator attempts rational explanation: “One of us walked in his sleep and did this thing,” I said feebly, “or – or it has been filed by the constant stream of sand particles blown against it by the wind.” (166)

Neither of them believes it, although the narrator is not ready to admit it. He clings “feebly” to what he knows are untenable theories “with that diminishing portion of my intelligence which I called my ‘reason’” (168). Later, these “explanations made in the sunshine […] came to haunt me with their foolish and wholly unsatisfactory nature” (179). Reason and rationality, associated with the sun and therefore productive energy, are themselves subject to entropy as the narrator’s fear and confusion translates, after dark, into chaotic, unproductive, “diminished” thinking. “There are things about us,” remarks the Swede, “that make for disorder, disintegration, destruction, our destruction” (48). The “willows” (as I will continue to call these “things,” though they are not, of course, the willow plants ) are increasingly evidently weird entities capable of using energies that lie out of human reach. They are inherently entropic and promote the same conditions in their human victims. The “exhaustion” of the narrator’s first disrupted night, for example, “only served apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the obsessive spell of the haunting” (173–4). Vulnerability is associated with disorder and diminishing useable energy; the more frightened the narrator gets, the more erratic become his thoughts and behaviour. Even when he admits his fears, talking about them “set me shaking a little all over. I found it impossible to control my movements” (187). The Swede’s view is that the willows seek a sacrificial victim and “[o]ur only chance is to keep perfectly still […] We must keep them out of our minds at all costs” (185, 188). But the narrator finds it difficult to control his mental state, becoming prone to nervous outbursts that put them in danger. On the second night, when the narrator madly decides to laugh away their fears, the Swede “turn[s] ashen white” and speaks in a “helpless, frantic way” (191). The dissolution of the barrier between the safe, real world and the weird, more-than-visible one is now close, and the narrator’s last rally to take “control of our forces” by making “one more blaze” is not enough.

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He sees, in the willows, an “impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly,”78 leading to an “enveloping sensation of icy fear” before the pain of a fall narrowly saves him from destruction (195). Released from the immediate threat, their energy returns with “great healing gusts of shaking laughter” (195). So does their capacity to act: they “put the wood on [the fire] so that it blazed at once” (195). The back-and-forth struggle between the willows and the men is always a struggle for control of energy. The willows pull towards entropy and chaos, the humans towards action and rationality. Yet the chaotic impact of the willows is also what stimulates the narrator to rescue the Swede from their final attack. Finding his companion missing from the tent, the narrator enters his most panicked state yet: I dashed out in a mad run, seized by a dreadful agitation. And the moment I was out I plunged into a sort of torrent of humming […] that same familiar humming – gone mad! […] The sound seemed to thicken the very atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty. (198)

He searches haphazardly, running “frantically to and fro about the island” (198), before discovering his friend at the water’s edge and restraining him from drowning himself. Panic, this time, reenergises the narrator’s system and enables him to act. Since willows and humans use energy differently, however, there is no clean one-way transformation from one form to another, and the final outcome is a stalemate. At first inexplicably, there is an “abrupt cessation of the humming and pattering” (199) and in the morning, “The sunlight lay in hot patches on the sand. There was no wind. The willows were motionless” (201). Energy is behaving normally again. The sun has returned to warm the sand; the willows no longer move by themselves. As we have seen, the two men and the willows compete for supremacy and survival by struggling over energy transformations. The outcome is ambivalent: neither men nor willows, in the end, colonise or destroy the other. The willows get their sacrifice elsewhere; the men get their escape; and equilibrium is achieved by each mode of being, weird and human, resuming their usual separate existences. Unfortunately, this equitable balance is achieved at the expense of the life of a less important “other.” The two men discover “the victim that made our escape possible!” (201): a body at the water’s edge. Touching it releases a telling swarm of humming, and its skin bears “[t]heir awful

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mark!” in the form of neat funnel-shaped indents (203). As fin-de-siècle imperialists often saw it, Patrick Brantlinger outlines, “empires result from the struggle for survival of the fittest among nations and races. The British nation and Anglo-Saxon race are the fittest to survive.”79 Unsurprisingly, then, the drowned body is “the corpse of a peasant,” possibly that of the boatman who tried to warn them (201). A local resident, therefore, has borne the brunt of a northern European intrusion into this liminal region. White imperialism gets a shock, but survives. While the Danube journey is not literally a colonial exercise, the story counts among “cultural expressions of that ideology which also goes by the name of imperialism.”80 For Brantlinger, much of the significance of late-Victorian imperialism lies less in its holdings than in its ideology, as a state of mind and set of values. The travellers’ journey is a colonising move; without at first questioning their right to venture there, they have “trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world where we are not wanted” (138). The multidimensional struggle in “The Willows” exposes a colonial relationship. The impulses of the two travellers: to travel, to explore, to use land and resources at will, to comprehend and master the new world, are shown to be misguided. David Punter characterises the story in terms of “a momentary defeat for the forces of ceaseless imperialistic exploration”: because the Danube is an “uncontaminated, pure,” scarily blank space, it is therefore “completely unintelligible.”81 Symbolic, linguistic colonisation fails; to the characters, their human voices feel “illegitimate” (145). “To name is to reveal,” says the Swede (188); the project of identifying and explaining the phenomena around them will unleash rather than contain them, and, as we have seen, to know a weird phenomenon as successfully as that is to be overwhelmed by it. To the extent to which the expansion of scientific knowledge is colonising, it too is defeated. Not only do normal reason and rationality become chaotic rather than productive, they are inadequate and not up to the task of knowing this world. What, then, are the “willows”? One possible answer lies in the close association forged in the narrative between the willows and the sun. The island, as well as being covered in willows, is covered in “hot yellow sand” (130), like a sandy analogue of the sun itself, and there are several references to the intense heat of the scorching sun. The willows themselves gleam, “showing their silver leaves to the sunshine” (127). Some decades previously, in 1860, engineer and astronomer James Nasmyth had observed puzzling shapes in the sun’s photosphere, shapes

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he described as “willow-leaves.” In a letter to Rev. Josiah Crampton in 1861, Nasmyth referred to “peculiar features […] which I have termed the willow-leaf-shaped objects, of which the entire luminous surface of the sun is formed […] The external envelope that yields us the true light of the sun is entirely made up of these same willow leaf-shaped objects.”82 Nasmyth produced an illustration of what he saw, showing fringes of the shapes around dark sun spots while “bridges of willow-leaves lie across the vast opening.”83 As Robert Hunt elaborated in 1865, these shapes (which some scientists preferred to describe as rice grains or granules) collected around dark spots on the sun and sometimes produced outbursts of light, at which times “those willow-leaves […] arrange themselves symmetrically around a dark spot, and front inwards, like sedgy grasses streaming out into the waters of a pond.”84 The energy given off in such sunbursts could be felt on earth: “Every magnetic bar in our observatories trembled, Aurora quivered in the skies.”85 The willow-leaves left a puzzle whose solution might explain a great deal about the sun’s energy and led to some significant metaphysical speculations—could the willow-leaves be organisms? Were they the source of the sun’s energy? Crampton wondered whether the discovery would prove that light had been created separately from the normal astronomical process, latent “as the spark within the flint until called forth by the Divine word” and thus reconcile Biblical and astronomical accounts of creation.86 In Hunt’s more secular terms, the willow-leaves might prove “the pulsings of vital matter in the central Sun of our system [to] be the source of all that life which crowds the earth.”87 The willow-leaves could present a link between solar energy and the mysterious élan vital —perhaps the link, showing the sun to be the single source of life and proving the unity of nature’s vitality. Is it possible that Blackwood knew about Nasmyth’s willow-leaves and had them in mind when he conceived a hot yellow island covered in shining willow bushes? Could he have been thinking of Nasmyth’s dark and spectral painting of sun spots when he wrote about shifting inhuman figures, “huge bodies melting in and out of each other, […] nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost” (153)? If he did, his route may have been (as mine was) through Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, which Blackwood had read.88 Here, Blavatsky cites Hunt’s article and gives her own gloss on

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Sir W. Herschel’s view that those “objects,” as he called the “willow leaves,” are the immediate sources of the solar light and heat. And though the esoteric teaching does not regard these as he did – namely, organisms as “partaking of the nature of life,” for the Solar “Beings” will hardly place themselves within telescopic focus – yet it asserts that the whole Universe is full of such “organisms,” conscious and active according to the proximity or distance of their planes to, or from, our plane of consciousness […]89

In a segue characteristic of Blavatsky’s compositional technique, a piece of scientific authority flows neatly into Theosophic assertion. On the basis of the willow-leaves, the sun, then, perhaps contained organism-like beings, that eluded clear observation and existed on another “plane of consciousness,” occasionally reaching out into ours. Whether or not Blackwood’s willow-leaves are related to Nasmyth’s, however, his willows belong neither to a Biblical nor to a Theosophic scheme but to something beyond both. Blavatsky argued what were called “forces” were “but the phenomenal manifestations of realities we know nothing about, – but which were known to the ancients and – by them worshipped.”90 At first, Blackwood’s narrator indeed feels compelled to worship the “fluid shapes” he sees and thinks of them, in terms that wouldn’t be out of place in a Theosophic text, as “hosts of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether” (146). But crucially the Swede rejects the notion that the willows belong to any human spiritual schemes; for him, what terrorises them are not elemental spirits or ancient gods because those “would be comprehensible entities […] whereas these beings who are about us now have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own” (187). In this sense, the “willows” have no motivation against humanity in particular, and they don’t yield to human explanation, folkloric, scientific, occult, or otherwise. They are incomprehensible and unknowable; if they can be seen at all, it is only because, like Nasmyth’s sun spots, the willow bushes give them an outline. The funnel-shaped hollows have no natural cause (they clearly can’t be normal animal prints), and the sound the “willows” generate has no detectable source: “It is unknown […] a sound outside humanity” (181). For the Swede, their humming sound is “precisely how a fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make itself heard” (180). The fourth dimension, as it is in “A Victim of Higher Space,” is here a powerful signifier of the unknowableness of other ways of

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existing. Mark Blacklock argues that “the ideas spawned by n-dimensional geometry” offered a challenge to Euclidean geometry that was shocking, but also “provided a rich imaginative framework for recasting physical space.”91 Impossible as higher dimensions might be to fully imaginatively enter, even recognising that they could exist was a significant step towards a new understanding.92 The weird frontier region breached in “The Willows” is at the very limits of comprehensibility and makes full use of such concepts that radically revise what reality consists in. Consequently, the narrator tries to cling to explanations that are less scientific but yet more comforting. On the first night, he is still operating in the relatively comfortable zone of believing he is witnessing “personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region” (153). Nevertheless, “I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed. For the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon” (153). As we have seen, the narrative explicitly sets aside predictable evolutionary, occult, and psychological explanations to leave only a weird, outer dimension. It may indeed be a fourth dimension, but it also resembles an atomic world: unobservable empirically (to recognised standards), inexplicable by conventional mechanics, shifting and indeterminate, subjectively dependent on the questions asked about it, and, intellectually, requiring acceptance of an entirely different conception of time, space, and matter. Blackwood’s Quantum Weird Weird fiction and the quantum world, Christina Scholz argues, are related: in both, multiple possibilities exist potentially, and both posit a “universe [that] doesn’t make sense” but which really exists behind the reality we experience on an everyday level.93 In “The Willows,” the narrator’s remark about a changed “standard of reality” is telling: quantum theory is “not supposed to make sense by any standard of how we have previously perceived the physical world.”94 For it to make sense, we must change our standard of reality. In “The Willows,” observable reality becomes revealed as something different to what it had been. The narrator reflects on the distortion of his interpretation of their situation:

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The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman making signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural character, and revealed in something of its other aspect – as it existed across the border. […] The whole experience whose verge we touched was unknown to humanity at all. (183)

The details described here, mundane on one level, have become strange and less real to the narrator. What was present is now absent, “robbed”— while “something” else, something indefinable and marked by an empty dash, is now present. Time, too, is distorted. It compresses to moments and stretches to aeons. The narrator experiences the island as a “primeval region” and the willows as “sponge-like growths” or “antediluvian creatures,” only to later feel “utterly alone on an empty planet” like a future last man, and to fear the death of the sun: “I never longed for the sun as I longed for it then in the awful blackness of that summer night” (188). The otter glimpsed in the water returns in story’s final line as the peasant’s body washes away, “turning over and over on the waves like an otter” (203). The peasant’s body may be the boatman’s, the otter may have been the body, the boatman (argues the Swede) may not have been a man: the object may have been each and all of these. The narrative never fixes this point; instead, the possibilities remain mixed in a kind of quantum state of superposition: as far as we can tell, the object was everything it was observed to be. In the context of “The Willows,” this is not a comfortable situation but a dangerous one. According to one account of quantum theory, from a condition of superposition, once detected the particle collapses into one of the possible states: “the act of measuring or observing an object often profoundly alters its state” and “the possible properties of the object may depend on what is actually being measured.”95 When Blackwood’s narrator looks at “swaying,” “interlaced,” “melting” shapes and wants to see elemental forces, that is what they become for him, inspiring wonder and worship rather than the chaotic terror of the second night (152). Later the first night, a second glimpse terrifies him, and in the morning, he resists admitting his fears: “Provided my experiences were not corroborated, I could find strength somehow to deny them” (161) and later he “postpone[s] […] plain talk” for “[a]s long as possible” (179). As we have seen, the more they describe and articulate their experiences, the more real and deadly they become: “Above all,” cautions the Swede,

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“don’t think, for what you think happens!” (190). Where in a thermodynamic reading of “The Willows,” the role of human thought and will is to guide and direct energy and action, in a quantum reading such efforts risk stabilising the version of reality that will lead to their destruction. “The Willows” is not the only one of Blackwood’s stories to exhibit quantum fictional traits. Some of Poland’s words about Blackwood’s Pan’s Garden, for example, suggest a mixed, indeterminate state underlying these stories, too: “to walk in Pan’s garden is to experience a collusion of boundaries, human and nonhuman, inner and outer, and balance and chaos, that falls poignantly in an alternative state between celebration and suffering.”96 In “May Day Eve,” from the same earlier collection as “The Willows,” the narrator experiences a sort of quantum awakening when he makes the mistake of crossing a certain moor alone on the eponymous night. The wind and fog are full of shifting shadows and forms: the world about me had somehow stirred into life; oddly, I say, because Nature to me had always been merely a more or less definite arrangement of measurement, weight, and colour, and this new presentation of it was utterly foreign to my temperament. […] I recall my singular fancy that veils were lifting off the surface of the hills and fields […] such a thing had never been possible to my practical intelligence.97

Like the world revealed on May Day Eve, the quantum world is not a definite, intuitive, practical world either, and does require a completely new way of understanding physical reality. Even more than in “The Willows,” the narrator of “May Day Eve” becomes immersed in a quantum condition as his rational sense of self abandons him: “I called in vain. No answer came. Anxiously, hurriedly, confusedly too, I searched for my normal self, but could not find it” (284). In this process of communion with an expanded world, again standards of reality, moral and physical, alter: “New values rushed upon me from all sides. […] a fundamental attitude of mind in me had changed” (292). He realises that anything that now happens to him “must seem not abnormal, but quite simple and inevitable, and of course utterly true” yet “my dim awareness that unknown possibilities were about me in the night puzzled and distressed me” (293). The new normality or reality is no less true for being hard to grasp intellectually. The climax of the story is an encounter and a merging with projections of the narrator’s lower and higher selves, or material and etheric

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bodies, in the forms of a gross caged man and an angelic female figure (306).98 Memory of the details (the “glamour” cast by the “elementals” he encountered) fades, but he remains changed: “The new world I had awakened to seemed still a-quiver about me” (311). Not only is the new reality an uncertain, “quivering” one, but both expanded consciousness and quantum theory, it seems, require and produce a fundamentally new and altered set of conceptual relations with reality, a threshold moment that can never be un-learned. In weird tales, where ontological distinctions collapse and the irrational or unreal can be treated as real, fictional literalisations speak back to and elaborate explanatory metaphors, often playfully. Egil Asprem identifies a “tendency among esoteric writers to start from the scientists’ metaphorical descriptions of, for instance, the energy, momentum and movement of atoms, and then to wander off into speculative realms where these descriptions are taken to literally imply vitality, teleology or even consciousness.”99 A ludic quality like this is evident in the way Blackwood’s “The Woman’s Ghost Story,” introduced in Chapter 4, presents physical concepts in the form of a spectre. The ghost haunting the house explains to the female narrator that I’m in different space, for one thing, and you’ll find me in any room you went into; for according to your way of measuring, I’m all over the house. Space is a bodily condition, but I am out of the body, and am not affected by space. It’s my condition that keeps me here. I want something to change my condition for me, for then I could get away.100

Like Mr. Mudge in “A Victim of Higher Space” who moves in and out of a fourth dimension and at times experiences being in several places at once, the ghost belongs to a “different space” that can’t be measured in the normal way. While Mr. Mudge travels physically through the fourth dimension (emerging, at the story’s end, in Bombay), this ghost is “out of the body,” transcending matter and also behaving like an electron. Spread “all over the house,” he is everywhere and nowhere, undetermined in time and space until a “change of condition” (which, it turns out, is his emotional recognition by the narrator as a loveable being) enables him to escape his current state. Her observation is key. Just before this speech, she tried to escape him by fleeing one room, only to run into another on the floor above and see a vague figure “between me and the windows, where the street lamps gave

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just enough light to outline his shape against the glass” (342). The shock of finding him here too overwhelms her: “I lay in a collapsed heap upon the floor. So there were two men in the house with me, I reflected. Perhaps other rooms were occupied too! What could it all mean?” (343). What it means, the story’s ending reveals, is that the uncle who sent her lied about the haunting so that she wouldn’t simply find what she expected to find. Accordingly, the ghost’s state remains unfixed until she asks herself the right questions about who and what he is: as I stared something changed in the room, or in me – hard to say which – and I realised my mistake, so that my fear, which had so far been physical, at once altered its character and became psychical. I became afraid in my soul instead of my heart, and I knew immediately who this man was (343).

Here, knowledge, feeling, and changes in states of reality are closely woven. The ghost is everywhere at once only until she finds and identifies him, at which point the quantum state resolves into stability and they are able to communicate and understand each other. Again, a “changed” or “altered” standard of reality needs to be accepted, and in typical Blackwood style, the new standard is an expanded, soulful, psychical set of relations between self and other, a weird state made natural by the weird science of quantum mechanics.

Conclusion In Blackwood’s and Hodgson’s tales, weird entities are energetic entities, whose interactions with the humanly knowable works are represented in terms of energy flows and transformations. Fin-de-siècle energy discourses provide for the weird tale a way of expressing weird otherness, fear, and even forms of communication, not previously possible. Where the second law of thermodynamics connoted the prospect of the decline of productive energy into universal heat-death, the first law raised possibilities for the consequences of energy conservation elsewhere in the system and the excesses of its build-up. Weird terrors, as natural entities operating on entirely different physical systems from those of normal terrestrial life and in abfuture times, are unpredictable, uncontrollable, and never fully knowable. They bestow the same traits on energy transformations.

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The House on the Borderland, The Night Land, and “The Willows” emphasise the “outsideness” of the entities faced by the protagonists, distinctly weird because they are not human, not revenant, not of this time, and not of this world. In “The Wendigo,” too, for example, Simpson feels “the touch somewhere of a great Outer Horror.”101 Alien otherness is salient and depictions of its touch express concerns about what might lie outside the closed system as well as within it. The notion of causes outside the system is an aesthetic violation that conflicts with the natural human or social Victorian desire for unity.102 Confronting a physical reality redefined by radioactivity, relativity, and quantum mechanics is also an aesthetic violation conflicting with the traditional desire for unity. Weird tales negotiates this uncertain borderland between classical and “new” physics. The discourse of quanta had not yet become widely available in the way that the language of thermodynamics had by the fin de siècle. While I don’t mean to argue that Blackwood was aware of Planck’s quanta or Einstein’s work, nor that weird tales are anticipating quantum theory of the 1920s, I do suggest that weird tales offered one way of exploring, often playfully, the kinds of questions about the nature of reality (or the reality of nature) that physics also investigated. In other words, similar nineteenth-century cultural conditions (in science, in spirituality, in philosophy, in literature) that in physics led to quantum theory also led to weird tales.

Notes 1. Charles Coulton Gillespie, quoted in Greg Myers, “NineteenthCentury Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy,” in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain, ed. Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 310. 2. Algernon Blackwood, “A Psychical Invasion,” in John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1910), 34, italics original. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 3. See, e.g., R[udolf] Clausius, The Mechanical Theory of Heat with Its Applications to the Steam-Engine and to the Physical Properties of Bodies (London: John Van Voorst, 1867), 357; Myers, “Popularizations of Thermodynamics.”

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4. Barri Gold, Thermopoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 11. I am indebted throughout to Gold’s rich and thorough account of concepts in nineteenth-century energy physics and their relations with Victorian literature. See also Michael Whitworth, “Inspector Heat Inspected: The Secret Agent and the Meanings of Entropy,” The Review of English Studies 49, no. 193 (1998); Tina Young Choi, “Forms of Closure: The First Law of Thermodynamics and Victorian Narrative,” ELH 74, no. 2 (2007); Jessica Kuskey, “Our Mutual Engine: The Economics of Victorian Thermodynamics,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (2013); Allen Macduffie, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Sarah C. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2015). 5. William Thomson, “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat (1862),” in Popular Lectures and Addresses, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1891); William Thomson, “On the Sun’s Heat (1887),” in Popular Lectures and Addresses, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1891). 6. Gillian Beer, “‘The Death of the Sun’: Victorian Solar Physics and Solar Myth,” in The Sun Is God: Painting, Literature, and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. J. B. Bullen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 168, 164. 7. Gold, Thermopoetics, 227–28. See also Donald Lawler, “Reframing Jekyll and Hyde: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Strange Case of Gothic Science Fiction,” in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 255. 8. Choi, “Forms of Closure,” 304. 9. Choi, “Forms of Closure,” 303. 10. Anna Maria Jones, “Conservation of Energy, Individual Agency, and Gothic Terror in Richard Marsh’s the Beetle, or, What’s Scarier Than an Ancient, Evil, Shape-Shifting Bug?” Victorian Literature and Culture 39, no. 1 (2011). 11. Gold, Thermopoetics, 91. 12. Guthrie Tait and Balfour Stewart, The Unseen Universe or Speculations on a Future State (London: Macmillan, 1875), 64, italics original. For related discussion of The Unseen Universe, see, e.g., Michael Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 60–61; Bruce Clarke, “Allegories of Victorian Thermodynamics,” Configurations 4, no. 1 (1996), 84–85; and Myers, “Popularizations of Thermodynamics,” 327. 13. Clarke, “Allegories of Victorian Thermodynamics,” 85.

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14. Myers, “Popularizations of Thermodynamics,” 317–18; and for a discussion of the varied stances of physicists towards religion, see David B. Wilson, “A Physicist’s Alternative to Materialism: The Religious Thought of George Gabriel Stokes,” in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain, ed. Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 15. Alexander, Victorian Literature and the Physics of the Imponderable, 7–8. 16. Egil Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror of Late Classical Physics,” Aries 11, no. 2 (2011). 17. Richard Noakes, “The ‘World of the Infinitely Little’: Connecting Physical and Psychical Realities Circa 1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 39, no. 3 (2008). 18. William Crookes, “Some Further Experiments on Psychic Force: 1871,” in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (Manchester: Two Worlds Publishing Company, 1926), 43. 19. Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium: Being the Substance of Six Free Popular Experimental Lectures Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1908 (London: John Murray, 1912), 252, and on Soddy’s career and achievements, see Linda Merricks, The World Made New (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 20. Joshua Glenn, “Science Fiction: The Radium Age,” Nature 489, no. 7415 (2012). 21. For discussions, see Alastair I. M. Rae, Quantum Physics: Illusion or Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); John Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Niels Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934); and P[aul] A. M. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). 22. John Henry, A Short History of Scientific Thought (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 290. 23. Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory, 21, 85. 24. Srdjan Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 146; see also Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 327. 25. Bohr, Atomic Theory, 92. 26. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 11. 27. Bohr, Atomic Theory, 4. 28. Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory, 21; see also Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 12.

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29. Rachel Crossland, Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Susan Strehle, Fiction in the Quantum Universe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Christina Scholz, “Quantum Fiction!—M. John Harrison’s Empty Space Trilogy and Weird Theory,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017). Arthur Machen’s interest in parallel worlds and other dimensions is shown in his 1936 story “N,” for example, see Aaron Worth, “Introduction,” in The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), xxix–xxx. 30. See Michael Whitworth, “Inspector Heat Inspected,” 50; Bohr, Atomic Theory. 31. Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables,” 132. 32. Gold, Thermopoetics, 31. 33. Mark Blacklock, “Higher Spatial Form in Weird Fiction,” Textual Practice 31, no. 6 (2017), 1106; see also Jacob Huntley, “Deleuzian Folds in Hodgson’s the Ghost Pirates,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 21 (2010), on folds of reality in Hodgson’s The Ghost Pirates (1909). 34. Darryl Jones, “Borderlands: Spiritualism and the Occult in Fin-de-Siècle and Edwardian Welsh and Irish Horror,” Irish Studies Review 17, no. 1 (2009), 40. 35. Gary K. Wolfe, “The House on the Borderland,” in Survey of Modern Fantasy Literature, Vol. 3, ed. Frank Magill (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press, 1983), 744. 36. Wolfe, “The House on the Borderland,” 744. 37. George C. Wallis, “The Last Days of Earth,” in The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction, ed. Michael Ashley (London: Robinson, 2002), 260. 38. Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 109–10; H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (London: Penguin, 2006), 81–82; and William Hope Hodgson, “The Night Land,” in The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002), 133. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 39. Thomson, “On the Sun’s Heat (1887),” 397; see also Thomson, “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat (1862).” 40. Ludwig Boltzmann, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics,” in Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems [1886], ed. Brian McGuinness (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974), 24. 41. Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Garden of Proserpine,” in Major Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), l.89–96. 42. Hodgson, “House on the Borderland,” 177.

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43. George Levine, Realism, Ethics and Secularism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 119. 44. Thomson, “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat (1862),” 393. 45. Clarke, “Allegories of Victorian Thermodynamics,” 99. 46. H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, Vol. 2 (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888), 240. 47. Frank Lillie Pollock, “Finis,” in The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction, ed. Michael Ashley (London: Robinson, 2002), 245. 48. Amanda Boulter, “The House on the Borderland: The Sexual Politics of Fear,” in Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Clive Bloom (Boulder, CO: Pluto Press, 1993). Blackwood’s “The Listener,” involving an unreliable misanthropic narrator and a house haunted by the ghost of leper may be an influence for The House on the Borderland. See Donald Burleson, “Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Listener’: A Hearing,” Studies in Weird Fiction 5 (1989); Terry W. Thompson, “‘He Used to Wear a Veil’: Pursuing the Other in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Listener,’” Papers on Language and Literature 42, no. 1 (2006), 103. 49. Wells, The Time Machine, 81. Wells is one of the few authors whose work Hodgson is definitely known to have read; R. Alain Everts, William Hope Hodgson: Night Pirate, Vol. 2 (Toronto: Soft Books, 1987), 7; on Hodgson’s reading, see also Jane Frank, The Wandering Soul: Glimpses of a Life: A Compendium of Rare and Unpublished Works (Hornsea; Leyburn: PS; Tartarus, 2005), 80; and Sam Moskowitz, “William Hope Hodgson: The Early Years,” in Out of the Storm: Uncollected Fantasies (West Kingston, RI: D.M. Grant, 1975), 23. 50. Oliver Tearle, “Dustopian Fictions: William Hope Hodgson and the Thing to Do,” Interdisciplinary Humanities 27, no. 2 (2010), 126, 128. 51. H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877), 159. 52. H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, Vol. 1 (London: The Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888), 3. 53. Jones, “Borderlands,” 32. 54. See Richard Noakes, “The ‘Bridge Which Is Between Physical and Psychical Research’: William Fletcher Barrett, Sensitive Flames, and Spiritualism,” History of Science xliii (2004) on action at a distance; and Rae, Quantum Physics, and Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory, on quantum simultaneity. 55. Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth From Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 305. 56. Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1995), 40.

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57. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, 277. 58. See Andy Sawyer, “Time Machines Go Both Ways: Past and Future in H. G. Wells and W. H. Hodgson,” (1995), accessed 27 October 2008, http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightwells.html. 59. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1871), 53. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. For discussion, see Susan Stone-Blackburn, “Consciousness Evolution and Early Telepathic Tales,” Science Fiction Studies (1993), 246–47. 60. Louis J. Lanzerotti and Giovanni P. Gregori, “Telluric Currents: The Natural Environment and Interactions with Man-Made Systems,” in The Earth’s Electrical Environment (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1986), 232. 61. Dionysius Lardner, Handbook of Natural Philosophy (London: Walton and Maberly, 1858), 205; Henry Mance, “Method of Measuring the Resistance of a Conductor or of a Battery, or of a Telegraph-Line Influenced by Unknown Earth-Currents, from a Single Deflection of a Galvanometer of Unknown Resistance,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 19 (1870–1): 248–252. 62. Stone-Blackburn, “Consciousness Evolution and Early Telepathic Tales,” 247. 63. Thomas Henry Huxley, “Evolution & Ethics,” in Evolution & Ethics and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1894), 81–83. 64. Huxley, “Evolution & Ethics,” 85. 65. Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society,” in Evolution & Ethics and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1894), 199. 66. Huxley, “Evolution & Ethics,” 82. 67. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture, and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 194. 68. See Kelly Hurley, “The Modernist Abominations of William Hope Hodgson,” in Gothic Modernisms, ed. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 69. See Hurley, “Modernist Abominations.” 70. Andy Robertson, “Sharks of the Ether: Immortality, Reincarnation, and Psychic Predation Within a Science-Fictional Framework in Hodgson’s Fiction” (2007), accessed 22 October 2008, http://www.thenightland. co.uk/nightsoul.html, para. 14. 71. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), 5–6. 72. Algernon Blackwood, Episodes Before Thirty (London: Cassell and Company, 1923), 36. 73. Algernon Blackwood, “The Wendigo,” in Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 2002), 185. The Wendigo is based

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74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83.

84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

loosely on an Algonquin legend as “the wind-walker of the Earth spirit”; Mike Ashley, Starlight Man: The Extraordinary Life of Algernon Blackwood (London: Constable, 2001), 97. Poland, “Walking with the Goat-God: Gothic Ecology in Algernon Blackwood’s Pan’s Garden: A Volume of Nature Stories,” Critical Survey 29, no. 1 (2017), 65. Poland quotes from Philippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece, trans. Kathleen Atlass and James Redfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 59. Michelle Poland, “Walking with the Goat-God.” Ashley, Starlight Man, 106–9. Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” in The Listener and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 181–82. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. Compare Algernon Blackwood, The Centaur (London: Macmillan, 1911), 254–55, 258. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 228. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 14. David Punter, “Algernon Blackwood: Nature and Spirit,” in Ecogothic, ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 48–49. Rev. Josiah Crampton, Solar Willow-Leaves: Or, an Account of the Great Spot in the Sun, as Observed By Mr. Nasmyth, in July 1860 (Dublin: George Herbert, 1861), 3–4. Crampton, Solar Willow-Leaves, 6. Nasmyth’s illustration can be viewed here in the Science Museum’s online collection http://collection. sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/co56984/solar-spot-oil-painting, last accessed 30 August 2018. Hunt, “Source of Heat in the Sun,” 153. Hunt, “Source of Heat in the Sun,” 153. Crampton, Solar Willow-Leaves, 15. Hunt, “The Source of Heat in the Sun.” Ashley, Starlight Man, 40. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, 591. Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, 509. Blacklock, “Higher Spatial Form in Weird Fiction,” 1104. Smajìc, Ghost Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists, 171. Scholz, “Quantum Fiction!” 1152. Kev Alistair, quoted in Scholz, “Quantum Fiction!” 1152. Rae, Quantum Physics, 3; see also Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 12. Poland, “Walking with the Goat-God,” 59.

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97. Algernon Blackwood, “May Day Eve,” in The Listener and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 283–84. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 98. On gross and etheric bodies in Theosophy, see Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables,” 157. 99. Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables,” 133. 100. Algernon Blackwood, “The Woman’s Ghost Story,” in The Listener and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 343. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and page numbers are given in brackets in the text. 101. Blackwood, “The Wendigo,” 167. 102. Choi, “Forms of Closure,” 315.

Afterword

This book has explored the place of British weird fiction in contexts of finde-siècle sciences. I have tried to show that the weird tale became what it is as a direct result of the conditions of Western scientific culture in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Weird fictions are stimulated not just by new and startling scientific discoveries—although these are clearly significant inspirations—but also by a new awareness of the limitations of scientific knowing, particularly of any single form of scientific knowing. That awareness is inseparable from genre. Nominally, science and popular fiction are considered different genres. But as I have been exploring, in the mode of weird, the overlap is considerable; the ideas and discourses of many of the scientific fields I chose to investigate were already weird to start with. That weirdness is only really visible with hindsight, after more than a hundred and thirty years of the weird tale, and so the history of the weird tale itself becomes a kind of Möbius strip, abhistorical, pseudobibliac, a failure of absence, leaving a visible trail that nevertheless at many points has been elided in criticism, if not among readers. Something similar is revealed about the world’s natural physical phenomena; the world eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science thought it knew turned out to be something else, something much less stable and knowable. Like natural selection, abhistories, and outer monstrosities, the more-than-visible quantum world has been there all along, we just didn’t know it. The occult revival in this fin-de-siècle context is as logical as the emergence of the weird tale. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 E. Alder, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4

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AFTERWORD

Writers of weird tales, like occultists, scientists, and scientist characters, shared a sense of the world’s multiple dimensions of wonder, and the urge to show how close they lay to the quotidian world and how easily a change of perspective could open them up. One Blackwood protagonist realises “in how simple a fashion the frontiers of consciousness could shift this way and that, or with what touch of genuine awe the certainty might come that one stood on the borderland of new, untried, perhaps dangerous experiences.”1 To be certain of being poised on the edge of such a borderland is arguably always a condition of modernity, but it certainly describes my experience of my current moment, as I write in early 2019 on the brink of Brexit, in the midst of Trump’s (first?) post-truth presidency, and in the expanding wake of climate change and ocean plastic. To me, questions of what we know, how we know it, how we act accordingly, and how to break out of the systemic circumscriptions of our everyday concerns have never been more pertinent, nor, probably, more difficult to answer. Can weird tales help? In the way I have tried to present them in this book, they can offer critical ways to think about knowledge, agency, and possibility, about the meaningfulness of action in a world where action can feel meaningless. Meaningful agency may depend on recognising its limits, that we should not act as if we know how everything in reality works, but welcome the fact that we don’t, recognising that a more responsible ethical position can’t depend on certain knowledge, because certainty is an impossible state. It’s not for us to make assumptions about either our own efficacy or about what is and isn’t possible, particularly within our limited human sense of time. Weird tales depend on deep time, future and past, on a sense of what existence is that transcends the individual or the nation as well as the human, on escaping the numerous binary structures that govern most of our modernity. Fin-de-siècle weird writers shared, write Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, some element of the visionary in their writing, some impulse or worldview that catapulted them beyond the everyday. In some, it is expressed in their writing as just a glimmer or a glint from a deep well. In others it is a great, raging fire at the centre of their work.2

That glimmer or fire may be the light of ecstatic revelation, or it may be the glint in the eye-analogue of whatever is lurking just out of perception. The transformative moment may be wondrous or terrible, but the point

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is perhaps the moment rather than the outcome. As the protagonist of Blackwood’s “May Day Eve” notices, “[m]y consciousness was expanding and I had caught it in the very act.”3

Notes 1. Algernon Blackwood, “May Day Eve,” in The Listener and Other Stories (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1907), 292. 2. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, “Introduction,” in The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (London: Corvus, 2011), xvii. 3. Blackwood, “May Day Eve,” 293.

Index

A Abcanny, 11, 27, 59, 61 Abfuture, 196, 202, 203, 206, 209, 214, 227 Abhistory, 11, 16, 60, 61, 65, 69, 142, 162, 237 Abhumans, 36, 61, 76, 156, 180 Agency, 13, 16, 31, 59, 90, 102, 134, 139, 143, 159, 181, 195–197, 211, 214, 216, 217, 238 Alchemy, 63, 68 Alterity, 11, 14 Anatomy, 97, 164, 174, 175 Animal, 14, 19, 25, 26, 31, 96, 101– 103, 107, 160–179, 185–188, 222 bodies, 166 consciousness, 169 evolutions of, 160 kingdom, 164, 176, 177 monster, 31 Anthropocentricity, 61, 170, 182 construction, 216 expression, 170

hierarchy, 163 non-anthropocentric, 12 ontology, 195 worldview, 163 Astral journey, 18 Atom, 24, 84, 195, 199–201 Authority, 16, 20, 29, 92, 116, 124, 132, 144, 146, 163, 222

B Beast People, 31, 161, 167, 168, 170–174 Bergson, Henri, 47–49, 178, 184 Besant, Annie, 20, 21, 47, 87, 153 Binary(ies), 7, 12, 24, 49–52, 94, 97, 108, 238 Biological borderland, 31, 160, 162, 171 Biology, 14, 23, 25–27, 31, 47, 69, 82, 92, 159, 160, 162–164, 169, 170, 172, 175–178, 185, 187, 188 history of, 176

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 E. Alder, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4

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INDEX

Blackwood, Algernon, 3, 13, 27, 29–32, 55, 117, 128, 132–136, 195, 196, 201, 202, 214, 215, 221, 222, 225, 227, 228, 238 “Ancient Sorceries,” 133, 141 “The Camp of the Dog,” 133, 138, 141 The Centaur, 75, 135 John Silence, 7, 18, 29, 30, 115–118, 121, 122, 128, 133–142, 149, 196–198 “The Man Whom the Trees Loved,” 13, 117, 135 “May Day Eve,” 75, 196, 225, 239 “The Nemesis of Fire,” 125, 128, 133, 137, 138, 141 Pan’s Garden, 215, 225 “A Psychical Invasion,” 133–138, 140, 196 “Secret Worship,” 133, 141 “A Victim of Higher Space,” 133, 137, 138, 140, 141, 222, 226 “The Wendigo,” 117, 135, 215, 228 “The Willows,” 30, 31, 117, 196, 201–204, 215–220, 222–225, 228 “The Woman’s Ghost Story,” 132, 196, 226 Blavatsky, Helena, 20, 24, 84, 205, 207, 210, 221, 222 Isis Unveiled, 205 The Secret Doctrine, 20, 24, 84, 221–222 Body, 19, 47, 80, 83, 84, 91–93, 95–97, 99, 102, 103, 109, 116, 123, 129, 138, 139, 149, 162, 164, 169–171, 173, 180–182, 226 and brain, 98, 102 and mind, 19, 66, 70, 79, 83, 86, 93, 102, 169

and soul, 93 and spirit, 51, 54, 57, 65, 70, 83, 84, 88–90, 93, 94, 96, 108, 121, 206 Boltzmann, Ludwig, 204 Borderland, 3, 8, 11, 16–20, 25, 26, 28, 30–32, 48, 49, 54, 58, 61, 79, 159, 160, 162, 165, 166, 175, 187, 195, 199, 206, 207, 211, 228, 238 science, 2, 4, 17, 26, 29, 80, 103, 117, 150, 202 scientists, 2 spaces, 159 Boundaries, 2, 27, 31, 53, 69, 141, 175, 177, 181, 209 Brain, 18, 47, 62, 63, 83, 92, 93, 96, 97, 99, 182 and spirit, 94 surgery, 17 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 2, 9, 18, 37, 118, 150, 175, 210 The Coming Race, 18, 210, 211 A Strange Story, 2, 9, 18, 118 Vril, 212 Zanoni, 18

C Carnivorous plant, 25, 176, 177 Carnivorous tree, 176 Cells, 164, 172, 173, 185 Chaos, 170, 198, 215. See also Disorder Chemistry, 46, 52, 63, 79, 88, 89, 103, 128, 173, 185 Christianity, 22–23, 29, 59, 163 Collins, Wilkie, 9 Colonial, 220. See also Imperialism Communication, 17, 22, 24, 85, 118, 148, 211, 227 technologies, 83

INDEX

Conan Doyle, Arthur, 18, 25, 120, 175, 176 “The American’s Tale,” 176 “The Horror of the Heights,” 25 Sherlock Holmes, 29, 115, 117, 119–121 Consciousness, 31, 46–49, 54, 63, 65, 70, 92, 96, 98, 99, 102, 134, 159, 166, 169, 185, 187, 204, 226 Corelli, Marie, 9 A Romance of Two Worlds , 9, 18 Cosmos, 12, 15, 21, 23, 195, 207, 209, 213 Creatures, 14, 31, 160, 162, 164, 171–174, 177, 179 Crookes, William, 21, 106, 121, 148, 199 Cryptogams, 31, 162, 164, 175–179, 188 Cumberland, Stuart, 9

D Darwin, Charles, 25, 162–164, 172, 176, 185, 193, 209 On the Origin of Species , 25, 26 Darwinism, 26, 163, 172, 174, 181, 182, 210. See also Natural Selection Detective, 115–117, 119, 120, 123–125, 132, 145 stories, 29, 115 Determinism, 19, 47 Dimensions, 4, 11, 26, 31, 45, 54, 80, 84, 98, 137, 202–203, 206–209, 238 fourth dimension, 140–141, 222–223, 231 Disorder, 196, 198, 212, 215, 216, 218

243

Doctor, 18, 28, 66, 88, 92, 95–102, 116, 123, 136, 139, 145, 183–185 Dracula, 16 Dr Hesselius, 18, 29 Drug, 18, 88, 90, 93, 98–104, 106, 107, 138 Dualism/dualities, 50, 52, 94 E Ecology, 13 Ecstasy, 30, 57–59, 61, 69, 70, 94, 102 Eerie, 13, 59, 62, 69, 164 Einstein, Albert, 200, 228 élan vital , 184, 221 Electrical fluid. See Mesmerism Electricity, 2, 17, 18, 118, 123, 148, 185, 201, 211, 214 Electric Pentacle, 142–144, 148, 149 Emotion, 52, 71, 91, 93, 102–104, 107, 133, 138, 226 Empire, 140. See also Colonial; Imperialism Empiricism, 15, 20–22, 24, 25, 32, 47, 52, 68, 79–81, 83–87, 89, 90, 93, 95–97, 100, 103–105, 108, 131, 132, 140, 146, 147, 161, 165, 174, 195 Energy, 23, 24, 31, 84, 184, 195– 202, 204, 205, 207, 209, 211, 212, 214–219, 221, 225, 227 conservation, 197–199, 227 physics, 30, 195, 196, 203 Entropy, 31, 196, 198, 211, 216–219 Epistemology, 4, 22, 28, 47, 54, 61, 71, 79–83, 87, 88, 91, 93, 96, 103, 121, 123, 124, 205 Eschatology, 31 Ether, 24, 130, 199, 200, 212 Evil, 12, 51, 58–59, 61, 65, 69, 70, 97, 138–139, 196–198

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INDEX

Evolution, 1, 25, 31, 46, 67, 162– 165, 168, 170–176, 179, 182, 187, 188, 209–211, 223 control of, 168 Evolutionary theory, 23, 27, 209 Experiment(s), 17, 28, 29, 52–54, 62, 65, 71, 79–86, 88–95, 98–108, 166–170, 174 experimental science, 22 Expert, 29, 30, 116, 117, 120, 122–124, 126, 138, 140, 141, 149 F Faith, 19, 21, 86–87 Fantasy, 2, 11, 14, 45, 209 Feminine/femininity, 116, 122, 124, 133 Fin-de-siècle, 3, 4, 6–8, 14, 16, 22, 23, 26, 32, 46–49, 52, 65, 70, 87, 103, 118, 124, 141, 160, 162, 175, 179, 195, 199, 210, 220, 227, 228, 237, 238 occult, 22 science, 4, 5, 23, 237 Flammarion, Camille, 203, 204 Force(s), 10, 12, 16, 24, 26, 31, 32, 84, 118, 119, 127, 136, 138, 139, 143, 144, 146, 185, 195, 197, 199, 201, 202, 214, 215, 222, 224 Fungi/fungus, 25, 31, 117, 161, 164, 175–183, 186, 188 G Gender, 14, 18, 113, 118, 123, 124 Genre, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 16 Geometry, 27, 223 Ghost, 1, 6, 118, 127, 134, 143–145, 226, 227, 232 haunting, 226

Ghost story, 3, 6–10, 18, 34, 120, 125, 132, 133, 146, 152 Golden Dawn, Hermetic Order of, 21, 29, 42, 55, 87, 124, 134, 136, 137, 144, 153 Gothic, 3, 10, 11, 30, 32, 127 Gothic fiction, 2, 4, 10, 14, 18, 25

H Haeckel, Ernst, 163, 164, 175, 178 Haunted house, 232 Haunting, 115, 117–119, 122, 123, 127, 131–133, 143, 145, 149, 227 Heat-death, 31, 196–198, 202, 204, 205, 211, 215, 227. See also Energy Heron, E., and H., 7, 29, 117, 122, 127 Flaxman Low, 18, 29, 115, 116, 120, 124, 125, 127, 129 “The Story of Baelbrow,” 126–128, 131 “The Story of Crowsedge,” 129 “The Story of Flaxman Low,” 129–130 “The Story of Konnor Old House,” 117 “The Story of Moor Road,” 128 “The Story of Saddler’s Croft,” 126, 128 “The Story of the Grey House,” 130 “The Story of ‘The Spaniards’, Hammersmith,” 124, 126, 128, 131 “The Story of Yand Manor House,” 117, 130, 131 Heterotopia, 31, 160, 162, 165, 166, 171, 174, 175, 179, 181, 187 History, 11, 175

INDEX

Hodgson, William Hope, 2, 3, 5, 12, 14, 30, 31, 61, 115, 142, 159–164, 175, 177, 179, 180, 183, 185, 187, 188, 195, 201, 203, 206, 209, 210, 214, 227 The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ , 14, 25, 176 Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, 30, 117, 142 “The Derelict,” 31, 159–161, 173, 179, 183–185, 187, 188 Life-Force in, 184 “The Gateway of the Monster,” 142, 143, 146, 148, 149 “The Hog,” 142, 148, 149 “The Horse of the Invisible,” 142, 147 “The House Among the Laurels,” 142 The House on the Borderland, 1, 11, 26, 30, 31, 196, 202–206, 209, 214, 228 The Night Land, 5, 6, 13, 30, 31, 147, 180, 196, 201–204, 207, 209–214, 228 Earth-Current in, 210, 211 Electricity in, 214 “The Searcher of the End House,” 142 “The Thing Invisible,” 142, 145–147, 149 Thomas Carnacki, 5, 18, 29, 115–117, 121, 122, 142–149 “The Voice in the Night,” 31, 159, 161, 175, 179, 183–188 “The Whistling Room,” 142, 143, 146, 147 Hoffman, E. T. A., 9 Home, Daniel Dunglas, 85 Horror, 2, 3, 7, 9, 11–13, 15, 17, 29, 30, 45, 51–55, 58, 65, 67–70, 97, 101, 102, 107–109, 136,

245

139, 163, 165–167, 170, 171, 182, 183, 187, 196, 204, 205, 208, 209 Hunter, John, 175 Huxley, T. H., 81–84, 93, 163, 167, 192, 211

I Immaterial, 17, 21, 82, 85, 87, 91, 97, 130, 143, 185, 209 Imperialism, 135, 140, 143, 166, 220 Instrument(s), 2, 21, 64, 65, 79, 80, 82–84, 92, 93, 99, 105, 123, 128, 129, 138, 139, 148, 149 electric instruments, 119 passive instruments, 149 Irrationality, 1, 14, 19, 107, 119, 127, 140, 226 Island, 160–162, 174, 176, 179, 180, 187, 215, 216, 220, 221, 224 as heterotopia, 169, 171, 177 heterotopic qualities of, 175 laboratory, 166

J James, M. R., 6, 130 James, William, 68, 99, 100

K Kingdom, 25, 163, 164, 175, 177–180, 186–188 Knowledge, 3–8, 15–16, 19–23, 27, 29–31, 45, 54–66, 69–71, 79–95, 98–100, 102–106, 108–109, 115–116, 119–122, 124–128, 130, 132, 134–142, 144, 149, 165–168, 199, 205, 220, 227, 238

246

INDEX

L Laboratory, 79, 83, 88, 89, 92, 95, 161, 169 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 172, 173 Lamarckism, 172, 174, 188 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 9, 18, 29, 118 Light , 20, 86 Liminal spaces, 161, 187 Linnaeus, Carl, 177 Literature, 25–27, 164, 196, 228 Literature and science, 3, 4 London, 49, 58–59, 62, 65–66, 75, 140, 170 Lovecraft, H. P., 1, 6, 7, 9–12, 15, 16, 28, 30, 52, 116, 117 “The Call of Cthulhu,” 6, 11, 14, 16 “The Dunwich Horror,” 55 Lovecraftian, 1, 6, 12, 67 M Machen, Arthur, 2, 7, 11, 13, 17, 22, 28, 45, 54–61, 63, 68–71, 76, 93, 94, 97, 108, 134, 165, 207, 208, 231 Far Off Things , 54, 58, 60, 68 “A Fragment of Life,” 58 The Great God Pan, 2, 3, 7, 12, 14, 16, 17, 28, 45, 51, 54–56, 59, 61–71, 80, 92–95, 98, 101, 159, 166 The Three Impostors , 55–60, 65, 92, 97 “The Inmost Light,” 12, 28, 56, 61, 62, 79, 92–98 “The Red Hand,” 58, 59 “The Shining Pyramid,” 59, 60, 65 “The White People,” 58, 63 Mach, Ernst, 25, 81, 97 Magic, 18, 19, 54, 58, 83, 103–106, 120, 121, 124, 142, 145, 148, 214

Magnetism, 24, 119, 148, 211 Masculine/masculinity, 116, 123–125, 128, 133, 135, 138, 141 Mastery, 4, 16, 23, 52, 104, 106, 107, 129, 140, 215 Materialism, 6, 18, 20, 22, 27, 55–57, 61, 63, 69, 70, 80, 82, 85, 87, 88, 95, 97, 108, 109, 127, 131, 143, 149, 159, 160, 166, 168, 169, 183, 187, 211 Mathematics, 6, 27, 91, 135, 202 Matter, 127, 149, 159, 170, 175, 178, 183–185, 188, 199, 226 kingdoms of, 188 and spirit, 141, 198 Medical/medicine, 46, 96, 103, 135, 136, 139 knowledge, 166 studies, 49 Medium, 21, 116, 123, 125, 129, 134, 138, 140, 149 Men, 122–124 Mendel, Gregor, 172, 173 Mesmerism, 18, 210 Mind, 14, 19, 47, 48, 69, 81, 82, 91, 92, 100, 105, 106, 108, 109, 116, 122, 134, 143, 197 and body, 81, 137 human mind, 21, 102 and spirit, 63, 108 Modernism, 16 Monster, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 28, 31, 45, 52, 59, 97, 107, 139, 143, 144, 148, 149, 160–162, 164, 175, 177, 179–181, 183, 184, 187, 198, 206, 209, 210, 213 Monstrosity, 14, 15, 32, 49, 53, 128, 202, 214, 237 Morality, 12, 13, 23, 50–52, 56, 64, 69, 95, 97, 165, 166, 169–170, 205, 210–212, 225

INDEX

247

More-than-visible, 5, 20, 21, 24, 25, 82, 102, 125, 134, 135, 140, 141, 166, 168, 195, 198, 205, 218 Mould, 31, 177, 183, 186 Mycology, 164 Myers, F. W. H., 24, 27, 47–49, 51, 53, 89, 118, 126 Mystic, 18, 28, 87, 94, 139, 140, 207 experience, 55, 58, 68, 69, 93, 98, 99 knowing, 100 state, 99–101 worldview, 28 Myxomycetes, 178, 186

knowledge, 30 science, 24, 115, 120, 135 scientist, 95, 136, 145 technologies, 147 Occultism, 18, 20, 22–24, 28, 29, 39, 42, 88, 94, 119, 121, 124, 125, 128, 132, 134–136, 143, 159, 201, 203 Occultists, 20, 29, 84, 97, 121, 124, 125, 205, 238 Ocean, 25, 160, 161, 187 heterotopic qualities of, 175 Ontology, 4, 7, 10, 54, 61, 69, 87, 91, 108, 130, 144, 149, 160, 165, 180, 199, 209, 226

N Nasmyth, James, 220–222 Natural history, 162, 178 Natural selection, 25, 163, 164, 168, 173, 174, 179, 187, 237 Nature, 13, 15, 23, 25, 107–109, 128, 182, 198–199, 214, 221 Nerves, 63, 98, 99, 123 Nervous system, 96 Nesbit, Edith, 3, 28, 54, 79, 98, 108, 207 “The Five Senses,” 28, 29, 79, 82, 89, 103–109 “The Three Drugs,” 28, 29, 79–80, 89, 98–102 Neurology, 62, 92, 96 New Weird, 3, 33 Numinous, 57, 58, 61, 62, 70, 95

P Passivity, 93, 100, 102, 116, 123, 124, 128, 129, 134, 139 Philosophy, 4, 19, 23, 32, 51, 69, 89, 200, 201, 206, 214, 215, 228 Physicists, 24–25, 106, 201 Physics, 23–25, 27, 119, 121, 165, 199–201, 203, 205, 211, 228 new physics, 27, 32, 199, 228 Physiology, 31, 47, 63, 69, 94, 96, 108, 164, 165, 166, 167, 174, 175, 185, 188 borderlands of, 169 Planck, Max, 200, 201, 228 Plant(s), 25, 130, 175–179, 188 evolution of, 160 kingdom of, 176 Plasticity, 159, 162, 171, 177, 188 Poe, Edgar Allan, 2, 9, 17, 37 Pollock, Frank Lillie, 205 Positivism, 21, 23, 47, 49, 80, 110 Positivist, 18, 24, 27, 32, 56, 63, 65, 70, 80, 83, 86, 87, 93, 94, 101, 102, 104, 106, 109, 116 science, 7, 19, 61, 80, 86, 87, 150 worldview, 45

O Occult, 7, 9, 17, 18, 24, 27, 29, 55, 64, 120, 122, 124, 127, 129, 140, 142, 145, 202, 205, 237 detectives, 116. See also Weirdfinder forces, 146

248

INDEX

Pratchett, Terry, 1, 2, 14, 41 Prichard, Kate and Hesketh, 29, 125. See also Heron, E., and H. Profession, 66, 116, 117, 120 Professional, 116, 120–126, 128, 141, 145 authority, 125 detective, 132 expert, 126, 135 Professionalisation, 29, 151 Progenerate, 168, 179, 188 Pseudoscience, 22, 147 Psychic, 29, 84, 101, 116, 127, 130, 149, 198 capacities, 88 force, 143, 148, 202 health, 210 planes, 149 sensitivity, 17 Psychic detective, 117, 124. See also Weirdfinder Psychic doctor, 30, 116, 133, 136, 196. See also Weirdfinder Psychical phenomena, 21, 39, 84 Psychical research, 16, 17, 20, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 84, 118–121, 123, 132, 133, 135, 159, 165, 166, 199 Psychology, 23, 24, 26–28, 46–49, 54, 69, 70, 89, 123, 126, 127, 223 experience, 98 explorations, 49 goal, 166 ideas, 48 marker, 100 mystery, 140 pathology, 51 state, 99 theories, 48, 54 unity, 65

Q Quantum, 105, 237 mechanics, 23, 27, 32, 196, 227, 228 physics, 1 reality(ies), 200, 202 state, 224, 227 theory, 27, 199–201, 223, 224, 226, 228 world, 200, 201, 223, 225, 237 R Rabbit, 164, 170–172, 174 Radioactivity, 195, 199, 202, 228 Rationalism, 97 Rationality, 15, 19, 21, 22, 32, 46, 61, 66, 80, 87, 100, 108, 117, 119, 122, 128, 133, 147, 160, 166, 168, 170, 183–185, 187, 188, 212, 218–220, 225 Realism, 40 Reality(ies), 1, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 28, 31, 32, 46, 80–82, 84, 85, 87, 98, 102, 103, 105, 107–109, 120, 121, 128, 132, 134, 140–142, 147, 160, 161, 182, 186, 196, 199–202, 205, 223, 225, 227, 228 Religion, 21, 22, 94, 198 Riddell, Charlotte, 8 Röntgen rays, 201 Rosny aîné, J.-H., 185 S Science, 5, 7, 13, 16, 19–21, 24, 27, 29, 32, 45, 46, 57, 68, 70, 71, 85, 87, 94, 97, 118–121, 134, 136, 148, 159, 162, 165, 167, 168, 170, 198, 201, 228, 237 history of, 61 materialist, 63

INDEX

positivist, 61 Science fiction, 2–4, 7, 9–11, 14, 17, 61 Scientific borderlands, 3, 4, 28, 46 Scientific method, 20, 63–65, 80, 86–87, 90, 104, 109, 126, 166 Scientist, 6, 12, 17, 20, 21, 28, 61, 64, 79, 80, 83, 88, 90, 92–95, 104–109, 116, 120–122, 125, 126, 132, 151, 163, 166, 168, 169, 238 Sea. See Ocean Séance, 17, 24, 84–87, 89, 90, 111, 143 Self-control, 125, 130, 139. See also Willpower Self-experiment, 95, 102, 103 Sensations, 99 Senses, 25, 28, 66, 67, 80–84, 90–92, 98, 99, 102, 103, 105–108 Sensory experience, 29, 81, 82, 92, 103, 108 Sf. See Science fiction Shelley, Mary, 2 Frankenstein, 2, 3 Victor Frankenstein, 104, 122 Ship, 183 Sixth sense, 84 Sleuth, 29, 115, 116. See also Weirdfinder Slime mould, 164, 175, 178, 186 Society for Psychical Research, 20, 21, 29, 47, 63, 83, 86, 118, 121, 126, 136 Soddy, Frederick, 199 Soul, 17, 21, 26, 70, 87, 92–95, 116, 134, 143, 164, 166, 168, 182, 185, 198, 207, 214, 227 Space(s), 92, 99, 124, 133, 140, 162, 166, 171, 174–176, 179, 188, 199, 203, 220, 226 and matter, 223

249

Spirit, 23, 65, 84–86, 88, 91–93, 95, 127–129, 131, 139, 148, 149, 207, 213 and matter, 168 communications, 145 world, 15, 16, 21, 24, 93, 119, 127, 213 Spiritual, 9, 18, 21, 30, 83, 90–92, 125, 127, 128, 160, 185, 209, 222 spiritual energies, 213 spiritual phenomena, 128 spiritual sensitivity, 149 Spiritualism, 7, 15, 17–20, 22, 24, 28, 46, 55, 85–87, 121, 123, 124, 128, 143, 160, 165, 166, 228 Spiritualist(s), 17, 20, 22, 83, 84, 86, 87, 123 The Spiritualist , 20, 89, 123 Spontaneous generation, 162, 178, 179, 188, 193 SPR. See Society for Psychical Research Stead, W. T., 16, 17, 53, 125 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 2, 16, 17, 27, 45, 46, 48, 49, 70 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 3, 7, 17, 27–28, 45–57, 62, 63, 70, 71, 79, 80, 88–92, 98, 160 Stewart, Balfour, 21, 24, 198, 205 Submission, 98, 100–102, 139 Supernatural, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15, 18, 19, 30, 60, 82, 127, 135, 136, 213 fantasies, 28 horror, 12 mystery, 140 Surgery, 79 surgical techniques, 166 Suvin, Darko, 7, 61 T Tait, Guthrie. See Stewart, Balfour

250

INDEX

Technology, 29, 30, 115, 123, 142, 148, 149 Theosophical Society, 134 Theosophists, 20, 22, 47, 83, 84, 201 Theosophy, 20–22, 24, 38, 47, 83, 84, 87, 144, 201 Thermodynamics, 23, 27, 31, 195–197, 201, 209, 227, 228 Thing(s), 1, 12, 60, 70, 95, 180–182, 205, 208, 210, 212–214 Thomson, William, 197, 203, 205, 209, 210 Time, 107, 195, 202–204, 206, 238 and space, 26, 205, 206, 226 Tree, 13, 176, 177, 212 U Uncanny, 171 The Unseen Universe. See Stewart, Balfour Urban spaces, 58 V Vibration, 17, 81, 118, 148 Vivisection, 64, 101–104, 108, 160, 162, 165–169, 171, 188 W Ways of knowing, 4, 8, 18, 28, 29, 49, 54, 61, 71, 80, 91, 96, 98, 99, 108, 109, 136 Weird, 5, 8–10, 12, 14, 25, 28, 32, 51, 102, 103, 116, 119, 135, 136, 145, 174, 183, 187, 200, 203, 205, 213, 214, 220 weird entities, 12, 26, 130, 215, 218 weird fiction, 3, 6, 8, 10, 14, 17, 23, 26, 27, 29, 32, 97

weird forms, 31, 175 weird realities, 6, 29, 71, 80, 82, 92, 104, 108, 109, 116, 141, 142 weird science, 4, 6, 27, 97, 187, 227 Weirdfinder/weirdfinding, 29, 115– 122, 124–126, 141, 142, 144, 145, 149, 150 Weird Tales , 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 26, 28, 29, 32, 37, 49, 196, 200, 201, 205, 226 Weismann, August, 172–174, 188 Wells, H. G., 3, 9, 14, 27, 31, 46, 159–168, 171–175, 185, 188, 206 “Another Basis for Life,” 185 “The Biological Problem of Today,” 173 The Island of Doctor Moreau, 3, 27, 31, 104, 122, 159–163, 165–175, 180, 185, 187–188 “The Limits of Individual Plasticity,” 27, 167, 173–175 “The Sea Raiders,” 25 The Time Machine, 31, 197, 203, 206, 210 Willow bushes, 221, 222 Willpower, 124, 129 Women, 95, 122–124 Worldview, 4, 13, 19, 22, 28, 32, 54, 55, 61, 103, 143, 163, 165, 179, 187 scientific, 45, 108 spiritual, 18 weird, 181, 189

X X-rays, 24, 147, 199, 201