Unnerving edgelands

"The weird: a dis/orientation" (2017) Roger Luckhurst

Excerpt from: Roger Luckhurst (2017) The weird: a dis/orientation, Textual Practice, 31:6:

Border/zones

Introductions draw out a boundary, mark thresholds; an orientation provides a route map through the territory thus delineated. What to do with a genre whose principal purpose seems to be the undoing of these gestures? Jacques Derrida once suggested that if the law of genre is to separate, to purify – there is a secret law, ‘lodged within the heart of the law itself’ that is ‘a law of impurity or a principle of contamination’.68 It is as if the weird thematizes this secret law of the law at every level: it is a fiction of strange zones and borderscapes, its monsters boundary-crawlers that slime all over generic quarantines, making borders less lines of separation than promiscuous contact zones.

Arthur Machen imagined temporal portals in clumps of ancient forest in the English/Welsh borderlands or in urban spaces found once in London but never rediscovered. For William Hope Hodgson, the Sargasso Sea was a suspensive zone where biologies horrifyingly intermixed. He also published The House on the Borderland, where a house on the edges of colonial Ireland hides a portal into other cosmic dimensions. Lovecraft found baneful influences in cut-off villages or remote valleys where the law of nature is perverted by unknowable obtrusions, a trick repeated in tales by Blackwood or Aickman.

Perhaps the biggest influence on writers of the New Weird is the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (1972; translated from the Russian in 1977). In this enigmatic book, the Zone is a forbidden site, full of detritus left by an extra-terrestrial race. The black-market in artifacts supports huge leaps in technology and is fed by a group of traders called Stalkers who are prepared to risk entering the Zone. The things they retrieve make no sense; no one knows how they work, or why, as they violate every principle of physics. It is called Roadside Picnic, because a character speculates this material is the garbage left behind after an alien stopover on Earth on the way to somewhere much more interesting. The geography of the Zone morphs oddly and with deathly effect. Stalkers suffer wasting diseases, and peculiar effects develop in the communities that exist near the Zone. If people try to leave the area, they seem to take something of the Zone with them, and those who enter the Zone suffer unpredictable effects too:

Everyone who spends enough time with the Zone undergoes changes, both of phenotype and genotype … You know what kind of children stalkers can have and you know what happens to the stalkers themselves. Why? Where is the mutation factor?

A quote from Roadside Picnic is the first epigraph to M. John Harrison’s novel Nova Swing (2006). This novel, the middle panel in the Empty Space trilogy, features incomprehensible technologies that emerge from a zone called the Kefahuchi Tract. In the first book, Light (2002), the Tract is an impenetrable limit from which seemingly no one has returned. All that is left at its edges are mad technologies and bizarre engineering, testament to millennia of obsession with the Tract by everyone that comes across it. In Nova Swing, a part of the Tract has collapsed onto a planet, creating a zone where traders navigate a shifting, incomprehensible space. ‘They died in numbers’, the narrator states,

of odd diseases or inexplicable accidents inside and outside the site, leaving wills too exuberant to understand and last testaments tattooed on their buttocks. These treasure maps, whose psychic north pegged itself to equally unreliable features of the Kefahuchi Tract in the night sky above, always proved worthless.

Roadside Picnic also clearly inspired Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance, all 2014), which features an anomalous zone, Area X, which swallows a terrain of grassland, lighthouse and beach in Florida. It seems to be protected by an impenetrable border, policed by a secret government agency, and expeditions sent into the interior through the sole portal all come undone in weird and unpredictable ways, the few that return no longer quite themselves (or not themselves at all, perhaps, but fuzzy copies of themselves replicated by something wholly other). The border proves strangely variable, too, creating an expansive borderzone of uncertain limits, where natural law and meaningful human structures of authority are subtly undermined. Area X is an extraterritorial borderland, one of those growing spaces in the contemporary world, Matthew Hart suggests, where

borders between territories do not represent the edges of Euclidean geopolitical planes, but ought, rather, to be considered as three-dimensional volumes … in which the space of the border has proliferated and become distended, appearing not merely at the edges of territories but within and without.71 At the core of this space is the Crawler, a fantastical chimerical beast, half human, half-slug, that is perhaps writing the very text we read.

___

68. Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, trans. Avital Ronnell, Glyph, 7

(1980), p. 204.

69. Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, trans. Antonina W. ​Bouis (London:

Macmillan, 1977), pp. 108–9.

70. M. John Harrison, Nova Swing (London: Gollancz, 2006), p. 116.

71. Matthew Hart, ‘Threshold to the Kingdom: The Airport is a Border

and the ​Border is a

Volume’, Criticism, 57, no. 2 (2015), pp. 173–89, 177. See also

​M. Amir and R. Sela,

Extraterritoriality in Occupied Worlds (New York: ​Punctum Books, 2016).

Jay