I have written before that Weird Tales was the first magazine in America devoted to fantasy fiction. Now that I have read whole issues and many individual stories from the first year and more of the magazine, I find that not to be true. Or if it is true, it wasn't true until there was an entire issue of Weird Tales devoted exclusively to fantasy fiction. In other words, every story in a given issue would have to be a fantasy of one kind or another for Weird Tales to have been the first fantasy magazine in America. And when did that happen? I'm not sure. I would have to keep reading.
As we have seen, weird fiction is not necessarily fantastic: weird is in the real world and in our lives. It is at work in both. Nothing supernatural, nothing based in fantasy need happen for it to be weird. So maybe Amazing Stories, which made its debut in April 1926, was the first American magazine devoted to fantasy, science fiction being a sub-genre in the larger and vaguely defined genre of fantasy. But that's assuming there wasn't a whole issue of fantasy fiction in Weird Tales between March 1923 and March 1926. That seems like a tall order, but it would take a lot of reading to confirm or deny the notion. I'm not there yet.
Weird fiction is about the past. I have lumped it with the other more conservative genres of romance, supernatural horror, adventure, historical fiction, and so on. Science fiction may stand alone as the only progressive genre, although not all science fiction is progressive. There is, after all, conservative science fiction, too. In recent decades, authors have tried to make weird fiction more progressive. I'll leave it to others to decide whether that works. I can't imagine, though, rooting for or sympathizing with a protagonist who is engaged in a Marxist struggle against his hated bourgeoisie, or who wishes to silence and oppress, if not murder, Jews or Christians or women (the original kind) or anyone else who disagrees with him, or who believes that we can and must save children from harm by cutting off their breasts and genitals, or on and on through the parade of horrible, naïve, or just plain idiotic ideas that make up progressivism. Edgar Allan Poe wrote from the viewpoint of men living in pathological states of mind, but I don't think we're supposed to identify with mad Montresor or the unnamed narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart." Besides that, those two characters and others like them have only murder on their minds. They're not trying to lay waste to the past, or impose totalitarian systems upon the earth, or bring about an end to history. There isn't any ideological motivation behind their actions.
It's hard for us to imagine now just how close to the Victorian era was Weird Tales at its inception. We picture pulp fiction as part of the fast-talking, fast-moving culture of the 1930s and '40s. And yet, in 1923, there were still vast holdovers from the previous century and the pre-war era: twentieth-century America was still living in many of its old forms and not yet aware of all of its new ones.* Spiritualism was one of those old forms, a holdover from a previous time, not yet aware that it was itself as dead as its subjects, as dead as the concept in physics of the luminiferous ether. That concept was slain by Albert Einstein as well as by anybody. Maybe its date of death was in 1919, the same year in which J.C. Henneberger (a Victorian figure in his own right) arrived in Indianapolis, soon to issue, with his business partner, first, Detective Tales, then, in March 1923, Weird Tales.
But wait, you might say, you just said that weird fiction is about the past. Wasn't the nineteenth century part of that past?
The answer is, of course, Yes. But weird and an awareness of weird are older still. Spiritualism is comparatively new. You might even call it an innovation. It was certainly an outgrowth of nineteenth-century culture, which was, truth be told, very closely interested in science and the idea of progress. Weird lives apart from technology; spiritualism is tied to it. Spirit photography is as good an example of that as anything, but how many stories based in spiritualism have you read that include some scientific or technological means for detecting, proving the existence of, or even dispelling spirits? William Hope Hodgson's stories of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder are full of gadgets. There are also ghost-finding gadgets in early stories in Weird Tales, including in Otis Adelbert Kline's adventures of Dr. Dorp. We still see that kind of thing in the instruments that contemporary ghost-hunters use. Employing material instrumentation to find something that is supposedly not material at all--they are spirits after all--hardly makes sense, but here we are.
Spiritualism and all of its trappings were in early stories in Weird Tales. The first story to appear in the magazine, "The Dead Man's Tale" by Willard Hawkins, and the first serial, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" by Otis Adelbert Kline, both include elements of spiritualism. Hawkins' story is in fact a transcription from the dead, made possible only by automatic writing, the same trick that Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife tried to play on Harry Houdini in 1922. But spiritualism didn't have any legs and soon grew tired. There was going to have to be something else to take its place if Weird Tales was going to go very far in its field. I think an awareness of weird--weird, which predated spiritualism by more than a millennium--would do. So would H.P. Lovecraft's brand of cosmic horror or science fantasy, a twentieth-century--or at its earliest a nineteenth-century--development. I don't know whether Houdini helped to make spiritualism go away, but he sure didn't hurt the cause.**
Houdini's stance against spiritualism, mediums, séances, and so forth also goes against the premises of so many early Weird Tales stories. Like I wrote the other day, he was not a natural fit for the magazine. Readers loved their spirits and their séances. Witness the letters published in "Ask Houdini." But maybe we should look at him and his presence in another way. In old Westerns, the new sheriff comes into town ("The new sheriff is near!") and says to the bad guys, "This town ain't big enough for the both of us." They had to ride out, either on their horses or in a hearse. Either the boondocks or Boot Hill would be their destination. So maybe Houdini was like that sheriff, saying, in effect, weird fiction can have either spiritualism or something better, but it can't and shouldn't have both. And it can't have both me and spiritualism. Not that Houdini laid down any kind of ultimatum. Not that Houdini and Weird Tales parted ways because of any conflict or difference of opinion on these things. (I think it more likely that their arrangement simply fell apart as the magazine did at about this time of year, one century past.) It's just that there were two opposing world-views, and, in competition with each other, the superior world-view won and spiritualism was shown the door. Readers and writers still hung on to spiritualism for a long time to come--there are trappings of spiritualism in Weird Tales as late as 1938 when Manly Wade Wellman's three-part serial "The Hairy Ones Shall Dance" was published in the magazine. (Published under his pseudonym Gans T. Field, "The Hairy Ones Shall Dance" was in the January through March issues of 1938.) But if spiritualism was already worn out and creaky in 1923, it was way worn out, and creakier still, fifteen years later. Wellman's including elements of spiritualism in his story actually weakens it in my mind. It also shows him as not yet having matured as a writer or a thinker. In any case, I'm not sure that any writer or reader of weird fiction today would countenance the whole business. Leave spiritualism to TV ghost-hunters and their gadgets. Let us instead have weird in our weird fiction.
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*In 1923, the most recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction were Edith Wharton, born in 1862, and Booth Tarkington, born in 1869.
**Another weakness of spiritualism is that it can work only in small, dark, and enclosed spaces, the natural habitat of the psychic medium, without whom none of it is possible. Weird works everywhere and all the time, even--by way of cosmic thinking not easily attained before the twentieth century--into the vast physical universe, all the way to the most distant and trackless stars. And of course it works for everyone. You might say that spiritualism, requiring a medium, is elitist, while weird is thoroughly democratic. In spiritualism there are experts.*** Weird can happen to anybody, no intermediary needed.
***And now here's a note to my note. It occurs to me now that pulp-era spiritualism and technocracy may have run on parallel tracks, even if they weren't connected at all. The proto- and early science fiction of that same era may have been more closely technocratic than was spiritualism. A return to weird and the creation of weird fiction, then, may have been a reaction to nineteenth-century science and progress, reaction being characteristic of certain brands of conservatism.
Technocracy has to do with gadgetry and technology-based processes, of course, but the key ingredient in technocracy is the expert, the one who knows and the one to whom we are to defer. (Maybe in that respect, technocracy is a kind of gnosticism.) In spiritualism, the expert is the medium or the psychic investigator. In technocracy (or bureaucracy), the technocrat is the expert. In either case, the expert is unassailable. In any system based on expertism (my new word), questioning the expert is verboten. Skepticism, let alone criticism, is not permitted. So: the coronavirus is naturally zoonotic. It came from a wet market in China. It did not escape from a laboratory. It certainly wasn't manufactured. Vaccines are safe and effective. They prevent disease. You must receive at least one if you are to be safe and to keep others safe. Masking, six-foot distancing, lockdowns, and wiping down your groceries and mail work. They prevent the transmission of disease. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are not effective against coronavirus. They are quack treatments. Only patented medicines work. (At this point, maybe we can call them--all of those things that are called vaccines--patent medicines instead. By the way, the spellchecker in Blogger doesn't even like the word hydroxychloroquine. That might just be a coincidence, but it could also indicate that we are not even to speak its name.) You may not question the experts on any of this. If you do, you're a xenophobe, a terrorist, an insurrectionist, a science-denier.
Now, an aside, an aside inside of a note to a note to a main article from which we are so far away that I can barely see it anymore: the concept of the expert might be related to the concept of the superhero or the superior man. Taken a little further, it might be related to the leader of a cult or to the cult of personality. Science fiction during the Golden Age of the 1930s and '40s, specifically the science fiction of John W. Campbell, Jr., and Astounding Science-Fiction, was caught up in the superhero/superior man idea. Very often, the powers of the superior man are psychic rather than physical. "Slan," by A. E. van Vogt, serialized in Astounding Science-Fiction in September-December 1940, is an example of a story about the psychic-superior man in science fiction. And we should remember that Campbell, reputed to be an exemplar of hard science fiction, began his career in college as a psychic investigator. I'm not sure that he moved very far beyond that, even late in life.
To return to the original topic, if spiritualism and technocratic or bureaucratic expertism have anything in common, it's that they don't and can't stand up to scrutiny. They can't stand the light of day and can operate only in the dark. And with spiritualism, it is literally only in the dark that it can operate. Anyway, the spiritualism craze and the technocracy craze ended a long time ago, but like TV ghost-hunting, technocracy and the cult of the expert are still with us. By the way, the advent of technocracy in America is dated to--guess when--1919.
Copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
