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.

Charles Dicken's and the "Tweaking" of Reality: Collapsing Subjectivity and Objectivity

All the Year Round: the Magazine

where Great Expectations was 

originally serialized.

So, I'm auditing a Victorian literature course this semester. And I'm interested in sharing some of my thoughts about the texts we're reading in there. We're currently reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Why discuss Charles Dickens? Why discuss Charles Dickens on a blog that is ostensibly focused on science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror?

Good question. I have a roundabout answer that will require a brief excursion in more general issues.

Tweaking Reality

I felt this for a while and am only now beginning to articulate it clearly, but, what draws me to science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural horror aren't necessarily their content--the aliens, the zombies, the sorcerers, etc.. Rather, what draws me to them is their unique relationship to reality. These genres--which I call the "weird genres"--tweak reality. What do I mean by tweak?

This is an obscure word usually thought to come from twiccian (to pluck) but has been used since the late sixties to refer to "fine-tuning or adjusting a complex system" (Lord Wikipedia). It's also used more colloquially to refer being "under the influence of methamphetamine" (Urban Dictionary).

I like calling upon all these shades of meaning when using the word tweak in terms of tweaking reality: (1) slightly altering the ontological rules that determine reality; (2) doing so in such a way the experience/effect of it suggests a drug-induced state, a different mode of perception; (3) and doing so in a slightly aggressive, violent way.

By tweaking reality, I mean, making it strange, bending its rules, allowing something to exist or something to happen that shouldn't happen. And the effect of this tweaking reality might be best articulated as a kind of altered perception, a new experience.

For science fiction, fantasy, and horror, quotidian reality is a starting point that is deviated from. It is a kind of base that, through contrast, foregrounds non-reality. Its aesthetic effects depends on a reality principle to deviate from.

Back to Charles Dickens...


In Great Expectations Dickens plays with reality in a significant sort of way. He continuously "tweaks" reality. Consider the following passage. Some background: the main character, Pip, is watching as a convict is being taken to a prison ship:

"By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty chains, the prison ship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like the prisoners.” (39)


I’m struck by the figurative language here, the simile comparing the soldiers to the ship and vice-versa. Also, I’m struck by how Pip metaphorically figures the Hulk as a “wicked Noach’s ark.” Let me try to explain why.

Not only do we have individuals being turned into objects, we have a reversal of this effect here, the turning of the ship (an object) into an individual (a subject). Also, we have the ship being figured through a kind of literary citation, if you will, an allusion to the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark.

We have here an intense example of what narrative theorists would call “focalization.” The surface texture of the world is filtered through the interpretive lens of young Pip. It's focused through him.

Indeed, the world derives from his subjectivity—his identification of visual patterns, his literary corpus knowledge.

Remember: “Seemed in my young eyes” (39, my emphasis). This verb “seemed” gives me pause.

“Seems” implies that the world unfolded through narration is an interpretation. We don’t have here a purely subjective interpretation of the world. Folded into the narrative is an allegorical “material,” a—I’m not sure what to call it—“story substructure” that Pip’s subjectivity is colliding with.

My hunch is that there is an interplay between two worlds here: the subjective world of the narrator and the objective world. It seems that Dickens tends to play with collapsing clear cut distinctions between the subject and the object.

He tweaks reality by breaking down clear cut distinctions between where characters' "interior" consciousnesses end and where the material, "external" world begin.

Subjectivity (consciousness, if you will) spills out onto the the objective world.