The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [166]
This acceptance, though, is very different from holding the label in one's bosom. Some writers in this book may feel a sense of personal allegiance to the New Weird; others may feel quite ho-hum about it. There is no New Weird manifesto. Definitions and bibliographies of the New Weird have been made by a fluid, unofficial committee of Adams, few of whom would, I think, erect a barrier inscribed with "Here Be the New Weird; Yonder Be Naught but the Old Ordinary." It's a fuzzy label, really, its very relativity a nod in deference to the difficulty of labelling literature.
But the label exists and I have set myself the task of tackling it a little, so to the "New", which a reading contra something old, whatever that might be ― and Ecclesiastes comes to mind. Literature is a product of its influences. We all riff off something, work against a certain background, mine a vein of thought or style to which somebody else showed us the way. So what is the Old against which the New Weird sets itself? Every writer in this book would probably have a different answer. I'm inclined to say, firstly, hang on ― wasn't "Make it new!" a Modernist catch-cry, and didn't Postmodernism remind us that we've been living in a pile of bric-a-brac since a month or two, give or take, after we came down from the trees?
Perhaps the only sensible and seemly reply is to say that you're trying to make a semblance of newness out of the bric-a-brac. (I feel Jerry Cornelius leering over my shoulder ― but Jerry wanted more than semblance, I now remember.) Eclecticism, writerly text, non-linear structures attempt to introduce into fantasy species of narrative not native to the genre, defamiliarisation of the ordinary and insertion of the ordinary into the fantastic, and, I would argue, a tendency to thin or vandalise the fourth wall while generally, though not always, stopping short of knocking it down, are all common features of texts found under the New Weird rubric; however, these tactics are not new, nor have they rusted in a cupboard since the heyday of the British New Wave (writers including Richard Calder, Jonathan Carroll, Iain M. Banks and Hugh Cook come to mind), nor were they even new then.
Another reason to be suspicious of "New" is the very good one that binary oppositions are always suspect. New is young, alive, snappy; old is senile, incontinent, annoying. Alarms go off at this point: one does well to be careful and not be arrogant. Personally, I don't set myself against any writer, style or theme. I consider myself an enthusiastic fan and disciple of many writers, alive and dead. If I have a fogey bogey it's a bogey in the form of a word, namely the word "should." How many times does one hear "A novel should be." "Characters should be." "A plot should." "A sentence should."? Once, in fact, is too often. The art world has discarded "should," but the mass-market economics which support the writing world, and probably, too, the time investment literature requires of readers, make such a casting off, on a large scale, much more difficult. Much so-called New Weird fiction, however, doesn't -it seems to me ― pay much mind to "should." By dint of that, perhaps something new has come or will come; but even if not, by casting off "should" one at least removes an impediment to the growth, if such is possible, of new narratives and new myths.
As I read over this essay, which does not seem very well-jointed to me, I remember that it is very hard to analyse a phenomenon from within
it, and while it is still alive and changing; still, it