Until now, this entry and the next existed only in draft form, and they were pretty spare. Publishing these entries now is part of my program of turning drafts long held in suspended animation into a final form.
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So I'm working with the idea that genre fiction, or the pulp genres, proliferated after World War I, partly because of market forces, and then proliferated again--when?--in the 1960s? The 1970s? Definitely by the 1980s and '90s. That later proliferation seems to have had more to do with the needs and ambitions of the authors, critics, analysts, and scholars of the pulp genres than on anything to do with readers and fans. During the pulp era, pulp fiction and pulp magazines were looked down upon as trash. After the pulp era (perhaps in bouts or in a pervading fog of nostalgia), there were those who tried to elevate it and attach it (or reattach it) to mainstream fiction or literature.
Critic Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003) looked at our literature in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; 1966). His is an all-explanatory theory. Two quotes early in the book give away his thesis:
[. . . ] the American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror (Dell/Delta, 1966, p. 26)
and:
It is the Gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers [. . .]. (p. 28)
Both terror (or horror) and the Gothic, or Gothics (my new word, to stay away from "the Gothic" as a parallel construction of the cacophonous "the Weird"), can be considered genres of the pulp-fiction type. Dr. Fiedler covered genre fiction in his book and even mentioned H.P. Lovecraft, even if it was only by his surname. He covered other American authors in greater depth, many of whom wrote before genre fiction became separated from mainstream fiction. Leslie Fiedler also wrote science fiction, as did mainstream novelists after him, including Walker Percy (Love in the Ruins, post-apocalypse, 1971), Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, dystopia/post-apocalypse, 2003), and Cormac McCarthy (The Road, post-apocalypse, 2006). I don't know whether the New Wave was the first "new" sub-genre within science fiction--i.e., the first following the end of the Golden Age in 1950, or the first post-pulp sub-genre--but it was named by a critic, P. Schuyler Miller, in 1961, or only a year after Dr. Fiedler's book was published, as well as at the beginning of a decade of nostalgia, reconsideration, and reevaluation.
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I have said that the proliferation of genres after the 1960s was less commercial than during the pulp-fiction era. That's true in its way, but the 1950s and '60s were also an era of consumerism in America. (Read the old MAD magazine to see one satire after another of advertising, consumerism, etc. Is it only a coincidence that a TV show about the advertising business of the 1960s was called Mad Men?) Commercial brandnames proliferated, too. How many products, packages, jingles, and slogans from that time have become lodged in our brains? The point is that writers, fans, and readers in America have been conditioned since childhood to think in commercial terms, in terms of brandnames and towards buying and consuming branded products. People don't talk about eating pizza or drinking soft drinks. They talk about specific brands of each--and of every other product, seller, and service there is. Countless numbers are like walking, talking advertisements for their favorite brands. Without their knowing it, they have been recruited by giant corporations into doing their bidding. And when it comes to branded, commercial products and services (including apps), Americans' powers of discernment are immense and cut exceedingly fine. In short, the proliferation of genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres in fiction can be seen as like a proliferation of branded products and services, each with its own unique and highly differentiated qualities. I have encountered a term in my research for this series. It's niche marketing. That seems to be what has happened in genre fiction.
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Isaac Asimov asserted that the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in 1950 when it became no longer possible for a fan of science fiction to read everything that was published in his field in every given month. For the fan and reader, science fiction had grown out of control. You could say that the reader could no longer dominate in his reading. Well, if that's true for the reader, why couldn't the same thing be said of the science fiction writer? If an ambitious writer could no longer dominate in his field, what was he or she to do? One solution was to dominate (or to imagine that one could dominate) within a chosen sub-genre or sub-sub-genre. A writer could say to himself or herself, "I might not be [or can't be] the most accomplished, admired, or influential writer of science fiction, but I can dominate in my field of dark-urban-gothic-horror-science-fantasy." And that's where we are, for every author now lets us know immediately in what sub-genre or sub-sub-genre he or she self-consciously operates. And not only is the sub-genre or sub-sub-genre a brandname, the author's name has become a brandname as well. And on top of that, many authors package themselves as like commercial products. Each has his or her own distinctive, unchanging, recognizable look: hair (or none), clothing, tattoos, piercings, accessories, and so on, like a superhero or a member of KISS. Genre authors may claim higher ambitions, but the words, the look, and the manner are all commercial. They're selling themselves and their works as branded products.
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One of the claims of "the New Weird" is that it crosses genres. Here is a sentence from Wikipedia:
Non-conformity to strict genre definitions is a commonly recognized facet of new weird fiction.
The problem is that nobody ever said you can't cross boundaries between genres. If there are boundaries, they exist only in the mind of the author, critic, fan, or reader. I would add that only the person lacking in imagination limits himself or herself in his or her writing. If you're a conformist, you probably shouldn't be a writer. A writer should set himself or herself free to write whatever he or she likes and to break through every perceived boundary and barrier. Earlier writers didn't limit themselves, because there weren't any genres, but also because there weren't any limits. Before there were genres and the self-imposed limitations of genre writing, there was, for example, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838), which is a sea adventure, a travelogue, a horror story, a weird tale, and ultimately a strange, visionary, apocalyptic, and uncategorizable work. For another example, there was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (1843), which is a Christmas story, a ghost story (including aspects of horror), a humorous work, and a work of realism, including social realism. In its looking into the future, it can even be taken as a proto-science-fictional work, or a work of alternate futures. Those two stories and countless others like them cross boundaries. Does that make them "New Weird"? No, but I'm not sure that anyone would claim such a thing. Burn, strawman, burn.
Now I'll go back to Charles Fort.
As I wrote the other day, Fort was a monist. He believed in the continuity of all things and railed against those who promulgated discontinuity, specifically scientists and science-minded people. The title of his first book, The Book of the Damned (1919), refers to recorded facts or occurrences--he called them data--that were damned and excluded by science. He wanted his data to be included in the whole of knowledge. He wanted continuity.
The proliferation of pulp genres--or the genrefication of fiction as I have called it--began at around the same time that Fort published his book, that is, in 1919. (That was also the same year that J.C. Henneberger landed in Indianapolis and began moving towards his publication of Weird Tales.) Before there were pulp genres, there was just fiction, or literature. In other words, there was continuity. The proliferation of genres introduced discontinuity to the point that science fiction and fantasy in particular are now broken up into dozens of sub-genres and sub-sub-genres. Call that an artifice, a construct. Lay the credit--or the blame--on scholars, critics, analysts, and academically or theoretically minded authors. If writers of "the New Weird"--others, too, including Walker Percy, Margaret Atwood, and Cormac McCarthy--have crossed boundaries among various genres, or from genre fiction to mainstream literature and back again, then they are only going back to the way things were before. In other words, they are making things continuous again, even if some may still cling to their favored genre labels or brandnames. I will add that "the way things were before" is the opposite of "new."
Like Karl Marx, another monist and haunter of the British Library, Charles Fort proposed an all-explanatory theory of nature and history. Leslie Fiedler seems to have done the same kind of thing regarding our literature in Love and Death in the American Novel. I very much admire Dr. Fiedler's book. Marx and Fort have their ardent admirers. (Leslie Fiedler was a Marxist by the way. Another by-the-way: like Dr. Fiedler, Charles Fort wrote science fiction.) There are those who seek to bend the world and its people to their theories, even if it's only in the smallest way. (Too often, it's in the biggest and bloodiest way. I'm looking at you, Karl.) There are those who would also propose all-explanatory theories. (Conspiracy theories are often all-explanatory. The basic Fortean concept is a kind of conspiracy theory, and a lot of conspiracy theories have grown from his data.) It seems to me that "the New Weird" is a theory and not really a thing. I can't say that it's an a priori-type of a theory, but maybe it's close. In any case, "the New Weird" seems to me a kind of brand-making and an attempt by its promoters to gain status and prestige for themselves as discoverers and theorizers of something they claim to be new. (You don't discover things that you invent.) Despite the desire so many people have for new things, there really isn't anything new under the sun. That includes, I think, the so-called "New Weird."
To be continued . . .
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