Weird fiction can be seen as a type of regional fiction. Setting in weird fiction is important, as is a familial, cultural, or historical past tied to a specific place. Sometimes we don't know where a weird tale is taking place. That can be disconcerting. We don't know where to anchor our reading or understanding of such a tale, nor our feelings about it. Part of the effect of a weird tale is in making the reader feel disoriented or dislocated. It's better, I think, when that feeling of disorientation or dislocation has to do with the events and occurrences in a story rather than with its setting, location, or sense of place. I think it's better to feel connected to a real (or real-fictional) place but perhaps otherwise disconnected, at least for a time, as we read. We as readers don't do well when we're floating or in free fall, out of touch with anything solid. The Rentharpian Hills aren't a real place, nor is Arkham or Innsmouth, but each has the characteristics of a real place and all are believable in that way. If there are three things in a story, one or two of them can be fantastic, but at least one of them should be real and plausible, a thing that attaches it to someplace on planet Earth and a normal, recognizable experience. The reader should feel like he or she could go to that place, or to the edge of it. Whether he or she can proceed and a weird experience ensues is another story.
The same thing can be said--i.e., that it can be seen as a type of regional fiction--of Gothic or Romantic fiction, for example, William Faulkner's Mississippi. Faulkner even invented his own county--Yoknapatawpha County--the name of which reads like something the demigod Wilbur Whateley would cry from the top of Sentinel Hill.
In contrast, it doesn't make much sense to talk about a regional science fiction. There are science fiction authors who have set their stories in a specific real-fictional place. Tales from the White Hart by Arthur C. Clark (1957) comes to mind, but that's not a perfect example. As I write, I can't think of a science-fictional place or region that is equivalent to the weird-fictional place or region, the perfect example of which is H.P. Lovecraft's New England. (Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley is another. We're reading his stories for our book club meeting this evening.) The whole point of science fiction is to be expansive, to move forward and reach outward, not to be confined, isolated, inward, shrunken, or backward-looking as in weird fiction; to seem real and to be as plausible as possible; to be freed from the past and not in search of origins, as Gothic or Romantic fiction is, if Ronald Schleifer is correct. In other words, science fiction strives to be novelistic. That is my sense anyway.
If there was an era of weird fiction in American, British, and Irish literature, it might have begun in the 1870s or '80s and to have come to a close in the late 1930s or around the time that World War II began. That roughly seventy-year period (i.e., threescore-and-ten-years, or the biblical allotment of a man's life) corresponds roughly to the era of regionalism or local color in literature, at least in the United States. If the war brought an end to the era of weird fiction, it may also have brought an end to the era of regionalism, possibly for some of the same reasons.
I have looked for dates inclusive of regionalism in America, but I haven't found any such thing. I think of that period as from the post-Civil War period or Reconstruction to the post-Great Depression, specifically to the years of World War II, the Cold War, and the more homogeneous, nationwide culture of the 1950s and after. The 1930s seem to have been the last decade in which Americans stayed within their own locality, state, or region and to have thought of their world in those terms. There are historians who have posited or believe in cycles in American history. I wonder if there have also been cycles of genre fiction, from weird fiction or fantasy to science fiction, then to weird fiction or fantasy and so on; or periods of Gothic-Romantic fiction, followed by periods of Realistic-Novelistic fiction, followed by, etc. But that's something for another day.
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| Four cover illustrations by women artists, the first by Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), the next three by Margaret Brundage (1900-1976). The first has great power. The figure in black is amorphous and unidentifiable. The artist has captured an incredible struggle. Put the next three together and they have some of the same visual and compositional elements as the first. However, they lack its power. These pictures are not illustrative of regional fiction, but maybe they show in some small way that weird fiction--and by extension all of genre fiction--did not exist in a cultural vacuum. Maybe they also show, again in some small way, that weird fiction is a diminutive of Gothic or Romantic fiction, or of fiction as a whole. |
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