Content area
Full text
"The focus is on awe, and its undermining of the quotidian. This obsession with numinosity under the everyday is at the heart of Weird Fiction" (510).
-China Miéville
To begin with: "There is an atmosphere of inutterable loneliness that haunts any ruin" (1). Karl Edward Wagner wrote those words as the opening to his first short story collection, In a Lonely Place (1983). There is something going on in those ruins, and Wagner clearly knows it. More suggestively, there is something that the ruins are making possible, something whose result is loneliness, but whose substance remains inarticulated, inutterable, an effect with no cause.
We might ordinarily explain the "hauntedness" of Wagner's ruins as ghostly or spectral, visible indexes to past pain or physical reminders of present absences. Such an approach has power, but only of a limited sort. Understanding Wagner's statement only in metaphorical terms forecloses any possibility of an otherwise to pain and ignores the possibility of a reparative affect drawn by the ontological transcendence of the ordinary that such sites might mark. This paper opens with a simple proposition: what would happen if we took Wagner's words at face value? What if there were literally something haunting those ruins that was (or better yet, offered a way to get) beyond our everyday ontologies? What if instead of a painful reminder of a lost or traumatic past, Wagner's ruins offer the possibility that the fear, dread, or suspicion surrounding ruins can be future-oriented, not toward what has or might have happened, but toward the expectation that something could, might, or even should happen?
So, to begin again: how does one explicate such a feeling without eradicating it? Two critical frameworks come close: Tzvetan Todorov's continuum of the Fantastic, and Mark Fisher's categories of the Weird and the Eerie.1 However, neither Todorov nor Fisher can fully explain the phenomenon Wagner calls our attention to. While I discuss this feeling that Wagner's ruins produce primarily in relation to Todorov's Fantastic, which remains the narratological touchstone for encounters in narrative that challenge known ontologies,2 the feeling isn't the Fantastic event; the feeling is its first derivative, the possibility of the possibility. Todorov made great strides toward isolating the defining narrative conditions that often exist in the presence...