Cthulhu Calling: Weird Intimacy and Estrangement in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This chapter considers the ways in which the concept of ‘the weird’ has been appropriated by scholars of the nonhuman turn to formulate an attitude to the Anthropocene, and how that scholarship has informed the writing and analysis of weird writing in return. It questions the nonhumanist approach to the weird, particularly the general consensus that venturing beyond human cognition and experientiality is not only possible, but the only ethically righteous choice. In response to the nonhumanist revulsion of anthropocentrism, it argues that to not consider weird fiction as centrally concerned with very human responses and impulses towards the nonhuman other is to do its complexity a disservice. An analysis of Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation shows that the problem underlying both weird writing and nonhuman theory is by necessity anthropocentric conflict between human subject and world. In nonhumanist frameworks the weird’s complex literary engagement with this problem is too often simplified to facilitate fantasies of access and participation in the world as well as to envision that world’s quasi-occult mystique. This chapter traces the pervasive animistic and enchanting tendencies at work in both weird fiction and nonhumanist theory and maintains that while the former frustrates and problematises those tendencies, the latter tends to leave them unacknowledged.