Weird vs. "The Weird"

When I wrote the first draft of my entry on Weird in Beowulf (Jan. 28, 2023), I used a little different title and a little different expression: I referred to weird as "the weird." I have to admit that I was influenced in that by the expressions in common use now, namely, "the weird" and "the New Weird." After reading and thinking about it more, I decided to remove the "the" and leave it at just "weird."

The definite article may seem like a small thing, but it isn't really. You might have heard that the Associated Press has instructed that we are not to use it when referring to groups of people. I take it that the AP is not like Soylent Green in that it's not made of people. Maybe it has been taken over by an AI, and so it can go on using a word--the Associated Press--that it has forbidden the rest of us from using. (What's the band The The supposed to do? Go nameless?) Maybe it should change its name to the Artificial Intelligence Press, AIP for short. You might have heard, too, that there are AIs in existence or in development that threaten to take over the jobs of journalists. I'm pretty wary of AI, but I have a feeling that it can do a better job at these things than can human journalists. Maybe they can learn to code.

Anyway, the definite article is no small thing, even if it is only three letters long. Here are my thoughts: to call weird or Weird "the weird" is to make it into a definite thing, an object, a category, a theoretical concept, a force, possibly a material force. (One of the leading theorists of "the weird" is a Marxist.) If we call it "the weird," then it seems to me that we have mastered it. We have turned it into something that can be understood, that can be held in the mind, examined and manipulated, turned this way and that. If we call it "the weird," we have turned it into something it is not. I think we have misinterpreted it, for we are not the masters of weird. Weird is not for us to understand. Weird does what it wants with us, not the other way around.

Like I've written, I don't think that weird is a force. I think of it more as a condition, perhaps a condition of our existence in this world. We don't say "the life" or "the love." We say "life" and "love." It's not "the faith" or "the madness" or "the despair" or "the joy" or "the death." You get my meaning. There's another offense in calling it "the weird," too. It seems a pretentious thing, the act of the intellectual too full of himself and his own ideas, too prissy and insistent on establishing and maintaining a name for himself by formalizing and theorizing on a literary genre that may be mostly his own invention, or at least mostly his own discovery. (We shouldn't leave out commercial considerations here, either: even Marxist authors like to sell their books in a free and open marketplace, although they might like it better if their god, the State, could compel people to buy their books.) But weird exists outside of literature. We write about it because it does, and literature is supposed to reflect life. Weird predates writing. An awareness of it does, too. We might call Beowulf and his Geatmen primitive or savage, but they knew a few things we don't. In our post-civilized state, we seem to have lost touch with the world, with nature, including our own nature, and with reality itself. It's no wonder weird was almost lost and that we don't really know what "weird" means anymore.

Weird is not a genre, nor is it a literary theory. It's not an intellectual system. It's not the sum total of the words or the very pulpish prose used to write our way around it. (Sorry, Lovecraft. Sorry, current Weird Tales website.) It's not a body of works. It's not in the names of authors thrown around in any essay, introduction, anthology, or website, even if they are from special places that are not the United States or the United Kingdom. (Namedropping is a favorite habit of another of the theorists of "the weird.") Again, we are not the masters of weird. It acts upon us. We write about it because we have become aware of it and witnessed or experienced its workings. But we may not understand it. In its essence, weird is beyond our ken, another Scottish word by the way.

So these are my thoughts, and they are why I won't reduce weird or Weird by calling it "the weird." It's also not "the New Weird," as something that is more than a decade old can't really be considered new. Anyone who doubts that should go get one of these new gadgets called a smartphone--you may have heard of them--and ask it how old it is.

So, no "the."

No "new."

Just weird.

Grendel, by Lynd Ward.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley