The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [163]
Indeed, the grotesquerie in these texts seems to be related to the texts' socio-political milieu. More specifically, it seems in some cases to focus upon the corporeality ― the very bodies ― of the characters. The Remade of the Bas-Lag novels, the dwarf-manta ray from City of Saints, the immortal and multiform Eszai and dreamlike animal denizens of the drug-induced Shift in The Year of Our War, Gwynn as a basilisk and Beth as a sphinx in The Etched City.
The question arises, why is grotesquerie such a prominent element in these texts, and why is there a proliferation of these characters with strange bodily forms? Speculative fiction is replete with weird corporealities, of course ― ghosts, aliens, cyborgs, monsters of all sorts ― and probably all of them could be seen as "weird." But in New Weird texts, characters' bodies appear in a grotesque mode ― and this changes the way we respond to them. We can't read those grotesque bodies in the same way as we do bodies that register as "normal."
What is the grotesque? For one thing, it's an aesthetic register that unsettles. Consider gargoyles, Medusa, Frankenstein's monster, the alien in the movies of the same name. The out-and-out blood and guts of some kind of splatter-oriented horror suggests anxiety about or the attempt to come to grips with death. But the grotesque points to something else entirely, something more subtle. It's an unease that suggests our way of classifying the world into knowable parts doesn't get the job done; it is, ultimately, confusion, because the different parts of something don't make sense together (Harpham xv). The grotesque demonstrates that there are things for which we do not have categories, and, therefore, that our ways of making meaning are artificial.
If the grotesque is part of the New Weird's overall aesthetic, how does it inflect or affect the stories' content? The grotesque in these texts seems to be inviting a particular reading of the texts' events, characters, or socio-political backdrop (depending on the text). Many are set in urban spaces populated by physically weird, aesthetically grotesque characters. These two elements ― bodies and cities ― play a dominant roll in the stories' symbolic or visual vocabulary. In fact, many of the stories themselves establish a connection between bodies and cities: in Iron Council, the Remade had to get out of New Crobuzon to found a city where they could live free of tyranny; Dvorak the dwarf is tattooed with an image of Ambergris, and later becomes a manta-ray that somehow is the city, come to reclaim the man called X, in City of Saints; images of Gwynn's body torn asunder populate Beth's artwork more and more as Gwynn's role in promoting slavery in Ashamoil increases; and in The Year of Our War, the city of Epsilon can be accessed only through death or a hallucinogenic drug, and is the origin of the Insects that terrorize the Fourlands. Broadly speaking, within the symbolic vocabulary of the texts, cities seem to stand for the overarching power or social structure, and a reading ― often a critique ― of those structures can be seen in the grotesquerie of the characters' corporeality. Whether power structures are tyrannical, totalitarian, corrupt, godless ― these texts use the grotesque to evoke a particular response about the way society is organized. In these texts, the grotesque points out the artificiality of unjust social structures.
And that, I'd suggest, is one of the strengths of the New Weird, at least in those texts that draw on the grotesque: with its apparent interest in the urban and the corporeal as an arena for power struggle, alongside its weird aesthetic, the New Weird seems to have a built-in faculty for social critique (or access to it, in any case).
One of speculative fiction's great abilities is to defamiliarize our own world so that we can better see it ― and the New Weird has a way