Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle by Emily Alder (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle by Emily Alder L. A. Delgado (bio) Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, by Emily Alder; pp. ix + 249. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $79.99 ebook. In Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, Emily Alder offers a clear and exceptionally compelling examination of the evolution of pre-Lovecraftian weird horror, a genre that simultaneously appropriates as it repudiates the positivist tendencies of Victorian science in its generation of monsters. In her examination of the genre, Alder illustrates the ways in which fin-de-siècle weird fiction is distinct from the Gothic, a mode which has, for better or worse, dominated scholarly discourse on horror fiction. While "the early roots of the weird tale are entangled with those of the gothic and science fiction" (2), Alder notes that the horrors that emerge from weird fiction are characterized by haunting abnormality, or what China Miéville describes as the "abcanny" or "teratological expressions of that unrepresentable and unknowable, the evasive of meaning" (Miéville qtd. in Alder 11). The book examines the ways in which late Victorian scientific discourses helped shape weird horror. Tales of this type, she argues, were invested in exploring and testing the borderlands of science and material reality. The weird, at least as it emerged in the work of writers such as William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and Edith Nesbit, challenged positivist assumptions about objective reality by introducing distortions, mutations, and absences along with [End Page 346] its inscrutable weird monsters. Alder argues that weird fiction also imagines other ways of knowing as well as other, possibly monstrous, types of knowledge that challenge the epistemological mastery that scientific positivism promised. The weird tale constructs "enweirded epistemological terrains that validate abcanny realities" (27). Alder also traces the cultural impact of heterodox movements and practices such as Spiritualism, Theosophy, and occultism, as well as psychical research, on the development of the genre. Such movements, like the fiction these movements inspired, challenged the claims of nineteenth-century science while simultaneously relying upon the cultural validation that science granted. While the first chapter defines the weird and establishes the parameters of her investigation, Alder's second chapter applies the claims of the first by exploring how science serves as a gateway to the weird in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Machen's The Great God Pan (1894). In both stories, access to the weird is achieved through scientific experimentation. But the monsters this science produces, science which is itself adulterated and made weird by metaphysics, are ones that are nearly impossible to pin down for study. Mr. Hyde and Helen Vaughan, Stevenson's and Machen's respective monsters, "figure as amorphous monstrous shapeless things, unknown weird beings of shapes and textures that don't belong in the known natural order of physical existence" (70). As the above quotation suggests, the beasts of weird horror lurk beneath the conventional trappings of the observable world. Weird science, however, is what grants one access to such beasts. As Alder notes in this chapter, though, the results of this weird science are not always satisfactory. Alder extends her examination of "weird knowledge" in chapter 3 by turning, in part, to the creators of these monsters and the revelations produced at the borderlands of science. Although the fictional scientists she examines, Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll, Machen's Doctors Raymond and Black, and Nesbit's Professor Thomson, all utilize positivist methodologies in their experiments, conventional approaches are not enough to account for the weird realities that emerge from them. Weird science, then, must embrace a type of "occult knowing" that relies "on a revised epistemology that included multiplicity, subjectivity, and a dissolved border between material and immaterial." As Alder aptly notes, occult knowing is an "epistemology ready-made for weird fiction" (87). In chapter 4, Alder introduces the figure of the "weirdfinder," a term that refers to fictional investigators such as Hodgson's Carnacki, Kate and Hesketh Prichard's Flaxman Low, and Blackwood's John Silence. Alder's...