WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES PT 4

 In the previous three installments of the WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES series, starting here, I tried to distinguish two traditions of metaphenomenal storytelling thusly:

"Worldies," as I conceive them, may possess all manner of supernormal powers, but they seem to be tied to a commonplace representation of "the world," in much the same way that prose SF stories take place in logically consistent worlds with one or more "wonders" in them. "Weirdies," though, exist BETWEEN the commonplace world and another, twilight realm wherein nothing is logical or consistent. I relate Aldiss' use of "weirdies" to the origins of the word "weird," taken from an Old English word meaning "fate," which connotes an illogical order superimposed over mundane existence. 

I'd revise this now to reword a "realm where nothing is logical or consistent" because it sounds too much like what I've written about "nonsense-fantasy" in my three-part AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE, starting here. The "weirdie genres" I was addressing-- principally horror, magical fantasy and science-fantasy-- aren't foreign to logic, much less consistency.

What I should have written was that the "order superimposed over mundane existence" is one that has more to do with an emphasis upon subjective (or "intersubjective") feeling, as opposed to what is supposedly objective fact. In this essay I wrote of 'Plato's synopsized view of Art: a "shadow of a shadow," the originary shadow being the phenomenal world, which is itself "cast" by the Eternal Forms. But for Plato, the Forms were objective reality. Centuries later, materialist philosophers would regard all the phenomena associated with "the real world" as the only measure of objectivity, while all things subjective were at best epiphenomenal.' Plato of course derives loosely from a long tradition of both religion and philosophy in which the world of the objective arose from abstractions with emotional tonalities, like Empedocles' "Love and Strife," or, going back even further, to the world being born from giant eggs or the bones of giants. 

A more correct phrase would be to say that "normative science fiction" follows the conception of Western science, in which all sorts of wonders may appear, but they're conceptually grounded in the notion that the world proceeds from natural causes, with all internal subjectivities being epiphenomenal to such phenomena. But in early religion and philosophy, the world of natural things is the epiphenomenal world, and the subjectively tinged abstractions are the base phenomena. 

The "worldlies" assume a world where emotional subjectivity is secondary to physical reality. The "weirdies," though, emphasize subjective tonality. In the genre of horror, "mad science" is not really the same sort of science one sees in Robert Heinlein or John W. Campbell. It's science refracted through the subjectivities of the scientists: of Frankenstein, Jekyll, Moreau. This parallels the way magical fantasies operate as well, whether they take place in far-removed magical eras, like sword-and-sorcery, or in modern times, like fantasy-comedies in the Thorne Smith mold.

So in the "weirdies" there is a logic and consistency that derives from how writers and their readers interpret the worlds of the intersubjective. The nonsense-fantasies of Carroll and others are intentionally more erratic, seeking to avoid the appearance of consistency, to depict worlds where things happen "just because." Arguably the better exponents of nonsense-fantasy can't help but project subjective fantasies that have intersubjective relevance-- Alice's fears of either being eaten or of eating something with calamitous effects-- but those fantasies seek to project the APPEARANCE of randomness, in contrast to any of the fantasy, horror, or science-fantasy authors thus far mentioned.