The uncanny has infiltrated the real, and in some sense that boundary is forever compromised. The things that haunt us in this age are often the things we care about or have some connect to, no matter how slight, and if they are also the things that matter we either need to become cynics or hedonists and change the things we care about so we don’t care when they’re destroyed, so the hauntings cannot affect us . . . or, more bravely and with more effort, let them haunt us even if it is painful, and through that haunting find some kind of act or agency or sense of the truth that is meaningful. No matter how large. No matter how small.
All while the hyperobject I am trying to pin down looms over me and shines through me and is all places and in all ways is shining out and looming over.
Resist.
– jeff vandermeer
By Jeff VanderMeer
This Earth Day it may be of use to think about how elements of weird fiction relate to the political sphere. Rather than creating escapism, mapping elements of the Anthropocene, especially malign agents operating in the real world, via the idea of the uncanny may create a greater and more visceral understanding (render more visible certain truths), precisely because so many of the effects of this era are felt in and under the skin, as well as in the subconscious.
The pursuit of the idea of hauntings in this context is in a sense the pursuit of recontextualizing or defamiliarizing, so that we do not normalize what should not be normalized. That weird fiction is up to this challenge should be clear even from the recent publication of Giorgio De Maria’s 1970s masterpiece The Twenty Days of Turin, an uncanny text that uses hauntings to comment…
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