Weird Beyond Description: Weird Fiction and the Suspicion of Scenery

Abstract

This paper uses Algernon Blackwood's weird tale "The Willows" (1907) to argue that the genre of weird fiction is characterized by a disproportionate investment in descriptive modes of writing. The weird tale's fascination with description contravenes narratology and conventional reading practices alike, as both privilege narration over description. Tales such as "The Willows" insist that significant subjects and agents have been overlooked in anthropocentric modes of storytelling and that description itself has been instrumental in this oversight, as scene-setting and other descriptive modes effectively cast such subjects as static backgrounds to more important human affairs. By repeatedly dramatizing the discovery of subjects and agents hidden within apparently static descriptive passages, weird tales offer a critique of anthropocentric modes of storytelling and point the way toward a more ecological understanding of interconnection.