Weird, Fate, & History

I have started reading Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1941). I'm still in the first section entitled "The First Hearing," and already I have found two quotes that echo some of the ideas about which I have written in this series on the 100-year anniversary of Weird Tales.

First, the omniscient narrator, who is close to the thoughts of the protagonist Rubashov, describes the state of the Party at the time of his arrest:

The Party remained dead, it could neither move nor breathe, but its hair and nails continued to grow; the leaders abroad sent galvanizing currents through its rigid body, which caused spasmodic jerks in the limbs. (Bantam Books paperback edition, p. 25)

"Galvanizing currents" is probably not an allusion to the experiments of Victor Frankenstein. Nonetheless, there is reverberation. I have a previous quote by José Ortega y Gasset from his book The Revolt of the Masses (1929; 1930):

The mass says to itself, "L'État, c'est moi," which is a complete mistake [. . .]. But the mass-man does in fact believe that he is the State, and he will tend more and more to set its machinery working on whatsoever pretext, to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it [. . .].  

     The result of this tendency will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as, after all, it is only a machine whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. (Norton, 1957, pp. 120-121)

So, in their works, both Koestler and Ortega y Gasset used the same kind of imagery, namely, that of the Party or the State as a corpse.

Second, before his arrest, Rubashov speaks to a fellow party member:

     "The Party can never be mistaken," said Rubashov. "You and I can make a mistake. Not the Party. The Party, comrade, is more than you and I and a thousand others like you and I. The Party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in history. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned. History knows her way. She makes no mistakes. He who has not absolute faith in History does not belong in the Party's ranks." (p. 34)

I had never thought about it in this way, but can Marx's concept of History have been something like the early medieval concept of Weird or Wyrd, perhaps based on an earlier concept of Fate? Note that both are feminine. Note also that both have their own goals and "no scruples or hesitation." Both History and Weird carry away individual men in their onward rush. My idea is that Weird came back into consciousness, at least in British and American literature, during the early to middle part of the nineteenth century. And it was during that same period that Karl Marx began putting forth his ideas about History. So in about the 1840s, did some part of Western thought come to a fork in the road, with a nonmaterialistic or even supernaturalistic Weird on the right and Marx's materialistic and necessarily atheistic History on the left? Did artists, including writers, choose the right fork, while science-minded (or pseudoscience-minded) people chose the left? And was Marxism the only alternative to non-materialism? Was there no third way other than traditional religious belief? You might say that liberalism represented a third way, with men freed from both History and Weird or Fate. Liberalism, however, shows itself too often to be weak and bloodless. Too often it simply slides into Marxism and other diseases of the mind and spirit. Witness our current situation. In any case, if there are only two alternatives, then it's no wonder that so much science fiction is progressive, if not outright Marxist, in its orientation, for what other choice is there for authors who reject non-materialism or supernaturalism, let alone traditional religion? Put more simply, have science fiction authors chosen all-knowledge over mystery? Have they pursued rebellious or revolutionary pride and triumph over weird-fictional acceptance, defeat, or humiliation?

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley