Labor of the Weird: William Hope Hodgson's Fantastic Materialism

Abstract

Although many of weird fiction's pioneers were anti-materialist writers, the tradition's central figure, H.P. Lovecraft, advocated a philosophy of “mechanistic materialism” in his letters and essays as well as his fiction. His materialism is essentially contemplative and theoretical, however, focused on intellectual investigations of and philosophical reflections on the weird. The English writer William Hope Hodgson, author of The House on the Borderland (1908), The Ghost Pirates (1909), and The Night Land (1912), introduced a different kind of materialism into weird fiction: a materialism not of aristocratic contemplation, scientific experimentation, and resulting madness, but of manual labor, physical struggle, and psychological resistance. Hodgson's protagonists, and through them his readers, encounter the disruptions of natural law that define the weirdness of his vision through the forms of labor which define the characters’ lives, and those encounters reveal the weird itself to entail a kind of labor that encompasses and exceeds human activity. The labor of the weird and the resistance to it transform the human subject who undergoes them and those transformations are reflected in the language of Hodgson's tales, imposing a labor of the weird on the reader as well. This attention to labor, its psychological effects and textual representation, makes Hodgson's fantastic materialism relevant to contemporary debates over the controversial aesthetics and politics of the weird.