Writer's Block Magazine

Modern usages of the word ‘weird’ as referring to that which is unexpected, extraordinary, or otherwise unknown retain some traces of its Old English linguistic root ‘wyrd.’ As a religious concept in Anglo-Saxon and other Germanic cultures, wyrd refers to cosmic fate; it is an invisible force that weaves together threads of the past into unexpected, yet undeniable, futures. Think of it as a divine motor that drives all change on earth. Although this connotation of cryptic, mystical prophecies is somewhat lost in its modern sense, weird still relates to things taking shape in reality which could not have been anticipated from the perspective of old, standard frameworks of thought and action. 

Reflecting on the articles I’ve been able to write during my past year at Writer’s Block, weird fiction has proven exceptionally helpful in mapping out our contemporary moment as a constant stream of unpredictable changes. The stories I’ve discussed about monsters, ghosts, aliens and other such weird figures that inhabit the margins of modernity give aesthetic form to the sense of defamiliarization that is released when cracks in the ‘normal’ discharge an array of alternative realities—strange, new worlds swarming with AI specters, fascist alien-deportation squads, and anarcho-capitalist monster-makers. In this way, weird fictions anticipate what it may feel like to live through a time in which previous notions of the ‘normal’ no longer properly describe what’s going on; they suggest, above all, that ‘normal’ is only ever a temporary and highly ideologically fraught veil that obscures the processes of world-ending and world-building that shape reality.

In my final article for Writer’s Block, I want to take a step back and explore from a more bird’s-eye perspective what exactly ‘weird’ means and what kind of politics may emerge from being more attentive to some of the contexts the term has travelled through. It seems to me that, besides connoting something unknown, the weird can also be approached as a specific political ethos—multi-faced and double-tongued as it may be. In the way that it tests our ability to accommodate transformation, the weird, in fiction as well as in social life, can offer political alternatives to the fascisms emerging in various parts of the world. Whereas fascist regimes need the violent extermination of alterity to prop up their myths of great leaders and great nations, weirdo politics approach alterity as a fundamental ontological concept. Recognizing weirdness as inherent to any form of living together opens up a conception of politics as a practice of constantly adapting to unfamiliar worlds and creatures. For weirdos, after all, earth-shattering change is business as usual.

The Old English epic Beowulf (7/8 CE) is one of the oldest surviving literary works that prominently features ‘weird’ as the Germanic wyrd. The role of Wyrd (often capitalized when personified as a deity) in this poem is comparable to that of Lady Fortuna in Greco-Roman mythology, functioning as an otherworldly actor that governs the fate of earthly humans. When Beowulf, the titular Nordic hero called upon to slay the monster Grendel that has been terrorizing Germanic kingdoms, sets sail for the coast of Denmark, the poetic narrator declares that “Wyrd oft saves the man undoomed if undaunted be,” which means something along the lines of “fate looks kindly upon the brave.” Beowulf’s fate is not predetermined, but rather depends on whether a divine force will judge his actions to be virtuous—in other words, whether he will kill Grendel and restore social order. What is important to me about following the weird back to its Germanic roots is that Wyrd in Beowulf is an active, non-human textual entity the presence of which manifests primarily in its ability to alter the course of (narrative) reality: the odd twists and turns that Beowulf’s adventure takes are governed by an unknowable alterity at the heart of the poem. However, there is also something counterintuitive and profoundly anti-weird about the function of Wyrd when considering Beowulf in the literary context of Germanic folk epics: in spite of it being a cosmic logic that ought to lie completely outside the bounds of conventional human understanding, Wyrd only ever concerns the fate of heroes divinely ordained to secure the rule of warrior-kings over their people. Ultimately, Beowulf’s Wyrd is to give kings back their power.

The ability of the weird to cause social upheaval becomes more apparent with the Weird Sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, written roughly seven or eight centuries after Beowulf. Still tied to its connotation of cosmic fate, these three witches confront Lord Macbeth with a series of confusing and disturbing prophecies that lead him into a paranoid frenzy: he murders King Duncan of Scotland in an attempt to seize the throne for himself, only to become a mad, tyrannical ruler that is eventually killed by a loyalist of the old regime. Even though the play ends with the rightful heir of King Duncan reclaiming the throne, the role of weird fate here is not simply, as it is in Beowulf, to reward acts of heroism and return things to normal. The otherworldly, seemingly nonsensical futuristic visions prophesied by the Weird Sisters effectively alter Macbeth’s state of mind, thereby bringing about an interregnum during which power is temporarily undecided.

The notion of interregnum, a power vacuum in between two regimes, is crucial to weirdness. I’m even inclined to say that a characteristic force of the weird is to evoke interregnums, to open up the gates of the social to the Outside. Listen to the Weird Sisters in what is perhaps their most famous chant: “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Open, locks, whoever knocks!” As anyone remotely familiar with weird, fantastic, or speculative stories knows: opening locked gates always releases the unknown—monsters, unpredictable logics, new worlds.

The idea that moments of social upheaval open up weird possibilities begs to be expanded in a more explicitly political register. It is worthwhile here to turn to the famous statement made by Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks (1928), which has lately been quoted to death by anyone trying to diagnose the madness of the 2020s, that the 1930s in Europe were “a time of monsters.” A translation of the whole sentence more faithful to the original Italian reads: “[t]he crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” An interregnum of morbid symptoms. A time of monsters. Grendel and the Weird Sisters having a ball. The way he saw it, post-World War I disillusionment with the state (the Italian state first and foremost, but Gramsci saw this as a more widespread political phenomenon as well) paired with the 1929 crash of the global economy caused a waning of acceptance of liberal capitalism’s hegemony among the disadvantaged working classes of Europe. During this interregnum, this temporary loosening of the consent of the masses to the capitalist ruling class, multiple new worlds became possible: new fascist and communist options both appeared in the minds of many as viable alternatives to liberal capitalism.  Gramsci’s ‘monster,’ even though it remains a throwaway figure of speech in his Prison Notebooks, communicates an idea that is comparable to that of the weird creatures central to Beowulf and Macbeth, whose monstrous and witchy doings are similarly symptoms of a momentary inability of the social to return to business as usual. 

Considering weirdness as a characteristic of interregnums raises two important questions for the purposes of conceptualizing a weirdo politics, especially in light of Gramsci’s analysis of 1930s Europe. First of all, how might we be less afraid of morbid symptoms than Gramsci was, which is to ask: how to inhabit the interregnum, rather than ridding society of weirdness? And the second question, necessarily following from the first: how might we enact this weird openness to new worlds without giving any breathing room to fascist initiatives? One of the monsters of Gramsci’s ‘time of monsters,’ after all, was fascism.

The French surrealist writer André Breton, a contemporary of Gramsci’s time of monsters, was a lot more familiar with the unfamiliar sides of life. And he was a Marxist too, although a highly heterodox one. A weirdo Marxist if you will. Whereas Gramsci saw monstrous undecidability as a social malaise that had to be cured by formally getting the Italian Communist Party in power, Breton’s politics did not depend on the ‘correct’ party calling the shots, but on a more fundamental “revolt of the mind,” as he writes in Communicating Vessels (1932). For him, resistance against fascism and liberation from capitalism would both have to begin with an upheaval within consciousness of the ideological codes that ordinarily program the subject; many of surrealism’s esoteric writing techniques were meant to cause aesthetic eruptions of those unconscious forces that liberal capitalism needs to repress in order to reproduce itself. The goal was to live with a constant readiness to be surprised, taking on a state of mind playfully adaptive to moments when the totally unexpected could suddenly appear as the very fabric of reality, when repressed desires for liberation and repressed alternate conceptions of ‘world’ and ‘human’ could rupture and change what is offered as ‘reality’ by those in power. 

Living through an interregnum, then, requires us to cultivate surprise, that brief moment when expectations have to be adjusted to accommodate a reality far stranger than previously imaginable, as a primary political attitude. Nowhere is this basic premise of the surrealist movement better explored than in The Last Days of New Paris (2016) by China Miéville, one of the most well-known authors of what is often called the ‘New Weird’ literary tradition. In the novel, centered on the surrealists’ anti-fascist resistance during World War II, an arcane piece of magical technology materializes the dreams of the Parisian circle of surrealist artists: apparitions like André Breton’s “Exquisite Corpse,” a creature impossibly collaged out of plants, industrial machinery, and a locomotive, and Victor Brauner’s “Wolf-Table,” a table with the head and tail of a wolf, band together on the streets of Paris to fight off Nazis. Gramsci’s description of mid-twentieth century Europe as a time of monsters/an interregnum of morbid symptoms gets a less mournful flavor here; what if these monsters aren’t symptoms that need to be cured by reestablishing ‘old world’ politics; what if getting rid of monsters and returning to normal is not only not an option, but also not even a desirable outcome? In the finale of Miéville’s novel, the Nazi takeover of the city is effectively thwarted, but ‘new’ Paris remains in its dreamful state, populated by surrealist art turned-to-life. Rather than concluding the novel with weirdness being dispelled and monsters and witches losing their extraordinary grip on the social, as is the case with Beowulf and Macbeth (and perhaps even in Gramsci’s politics as well), the story ends with the protagonist, an ordinary, human resistance fighter, “step[ping] over the boundary [of the enchanted city], back into New Paris” to live among the material manifestations of surrealist dreams—to keep living in this interregnum, this time of monsters.

The debt that many authors of New Weird fiction have to surrealism is to understand the imagination as a dimension of reality that functions according to a new reality principle, one which may differ from the one that governs the society it exists within—and, crucially, to understand the eruption of this new reality principle, this new organization of time and space, consciousness and body, as a liberatory, and therefore also a political, moment. Rather than dispelling the weird as a confusing aberration, the clue is to keep faith with the weird and learn to become talented weirdos who playfully inhabit interregnums. “Realists of another reality.” That’s how author Ursula K. Le Guin, who should rightfully be considered one of the forerunners of the New Weird, describes those for whom writing and reading science-fictional, fantastic, weird, and speculative stories is a way of life. The position of weirdo, then, suggests a politics that asks what kind of society could accommodate a constant influx of realists of other realities and a constant eruption of new reality principles.

This means that rather than just evoking interregnums, the weird also suggests a political ethos that is explicitly anti-conservative and anti-xenophobic; the weird and fascism are necessarily antithetical. In that sense, recent waves of white supremacist violence against immigrants can be understood as failures to adapt to weird times. Globalization itself reads like a weird fiction in which the demands of climate catastrophe, state repression, and war create unpredictable flows of people that weave together new cultures. Far-right movements, and especially their fascist fringes, have no stories to tell about new worlds, and therefore no vision of how to live through such transformative global crises in sustainable and ethical ways.

The lack of such a vision has been adequately described by political commentator Naomi Klein as ‘end-times fascism.’ Contemporary fascists have basically accepted that the world is ending and decided that the best course of action is to double down on imperial exploitation, war, and white nationalism and wait for the whole thing to burn down: masked rioters burned cars and intimidated people they perceived as immigrants in early June in Belfast, Northern Ireland; black-clad members of far-right movement Defend Netherlands burned an asylum-seekers’ center while carrying VOC flags in mid-May in Loosdrecht, the Netherlands; in the U.S. race riots aren’t even needed since ICE agents have been violently deporting people all year long. Those increasingly radicalized into far-right politics and activism are fighting to maintain and extend white supremacy; they’re fighting to ban books discussing cultural and gender diversity (a trend which has recently flown over from the U.S. to the Netherlands as well); they’re fighting, in other words, to cling on to an old world order. These people are astonishingly non-weird.

The notion of ‘end times,’ after all, is a theological concept that only makes sense in the vernacular of Christian nationalists and the fascists that adopt religious views to win over conservative voters. For weirdos, on the other hand, time can never end: it merely bends and trips over into parallel timelines or unexpected wormholes. Weird therefore suggests something fundamental about life, social order, and futurity, namely that becoming is always becoming weird. Look no further than its deepest linguistic roots: weird, via its relation to the Old English wyrd, belongs to the same linguistic cluster as the modern Dutch verb ‘worden’ and the German ‘werden,’ both of which mean ‘to become.’ And all of these words are derived from the proto-Germanic ‘werþan’—or, ‘that which will come about.’ The phrase ‘becoming is always becoming weird’ should then be read as a tautology: weirdness is inherent to processes of becoming. Whatever happens, it will be weird. 

Written by Victor Keyser