The Weird History of the Novel (Part 3): "Whether devil or man I knew not"

So, I have a complicated argument I want to make in this post, but I don't have the time to really "get into it." There are a lot of premises that I probably need time more laying out and substantiating. Let me just be forthright and lay those premises in a schematic fashion:

Premise 1: Weird fiction (by which I mean modern fantasy, supernatural horror, and science fiction) is genealogically linked to realist literature. This is because weird fiction takes as its first principle the deviation from reality. You need a bedrock of reality to deviate from before you have weirdness and strangeness.

Premise 2: Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defore, is one of the inaugural texts of realism. It's a good text to consider the "beginning of realism" in fiction.

Premise 3: If something evolves from something else (e.g. reptiles evolve from fish), then within the originary element we can perhaps retroactively glimpse elements of what will evolve from it. Let me stick with my fish and reptile example to further demonstrate what I mena. We can see in the "cold-blooded" nature of fish the cold-blood" nature of reptiles.

Considering these three premises, here's my argument: we can glimpse in Robinson Crusoe, what I am framing here as the inaugural moment of realism in literature, the shape of "weird fiction" literature to come. The fetus that will become modern fantasy, supernatural horror, and science fiction is growing within the stomach of early "realist" texts.

Let me try to make a case for this by supplying an example of what I mean. As my example I offer an analysis of an extended passage from Robinson Crusoe. Some context: Robinson is gathering some wood and he has a very strange experience:

While I was cutting down some wood here, I percieved that behind a very thick branch of low brushwood or underwood, there was a kind of hollow place; I was curious to look into it, and getting with difficulty into the mouth of it, I found it was pretty large, that is to say, sufficient for me to stand upright in it, and perhaps another with me; but I must confess to you, I made more haste than I did in, when looking father into the place, and which was perfectly dark, I saw two broad shining eyes of some creature, whether devil or man I knew not, which twinkled like two stars, the dim light of the cave's mouth shining durectly in and making the reflection. (174-75, my emphasis).

Here you have a moment of uncertainty. Robinson encounters something and he's not sure what it is. We can describe this experience in terms of his ability to interpret the world, to know it--his cognitive faculties. Here his cognitive faculties have failed. He's confronted with something that he is struggling to interpret: "Whether devil or man, I knew not."

This moment, when our "interpretive frameworks" fail us, i.e., when our ability to understand the world fails us, these moments are considered by famous literary Tzvetan Todorov as "the fantastic." The fantastic for Todorov is that experience where we are no longer able to know the world. Something handicaps our ability to know reality. Therefore, reality becomes an uncertainty. This is the fantastic.

Thus, the argument I want to begin to make with this post is that a kernel for modern fantasy, supernatural horror, and science fiction can be glimpsed as emerging alongside realism.

We can see something in early realism, in the first novels: it's as if when the first literary light was cast on reality this reality necessarily cast many shadows, shadows that were strange, and confusing, and occasionally wonderful, and occasionally horrifying.