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Alongside the fantasist’s urge to literalise and concretise problematics, modern – particularly geek – culture is characterised by an accelerating circuit of teratogenesis, new monsters endlessly produced and consumed (exemplified in commodity form by the innumerable RPG and video-game bestiaries; by the coquetry with which films hint at and protect their ‘monster shot’; by Pokémon, which deployed the cultural addiction as its slogan: ‘Gotta catch ’em all!’).

If the contradiction between Weird and hauntological was sublatable, then such drives would surely have led to the monstrous embodiment of any putative ‘resolved’ third term between Weird and haunt.

Nor is it difficult to imagine what such a synthesis would be. The outstanding synecdochic signifier for a revenant human dead is the skull – mind-seat now empty-eyed, memento mori, grinning, screaming.(42) The nonpareil iteration of the embodied Weird is the tentacle, and by suspiciously perfect chance, the most Weird-ly mutable – formless – of all tentacled animals is the octopus, the body of which, a bulbous, generally roundish shape distinguished by two prominent eyes, is vaguely homologous with a human skull.

The shapes are ready, and take little to combine: the Weird-hauntological monster is clearly a tentacled skull (see below for my own rendition).

Considering the fecundity and vigour of the teratological drive, the symbolic resonance of its constituents and their apparent topological compatibility for easy crossbreeding, the extreme rarity of the skulltopus in culture is mysterious. There are a very few examples, but the pickings are astound­ingly meagre.(43) There is clearly something not right about it – the two components may imply one another but are resistant to syncrex, and the categorical unease this occasions denies the figure proliferation. The Weird and the hauntological generally relate to each other not by sublation, nor, pace James, by addition, but by either-one-or-the-otherness, in a manner suggestive of quantum superposition.

Bataille’s favourite anarcho-visionary marine biologist, Jean Painlevé, understood this. His 1945 ‘Le Vampire’44 contains extraordinary footage of an octopus lasciviously crawling over a human skull very similar to it in shape and proportion. The octopus should, with that oozability of Weird skin, merge with the skull to become a skulltopus.

That event is the asymptote of the interaction we see – but of course it does not happen, because it cannot.

Jean Painlevé, ‘Le Vampire’ (Science is Fiction BFIVD17190)

Instead, Painlevé shows us the unstable haptic flirtation of the two without merger. Those seconds are fleeting – the intervening years have distinguished the traditions of skull and octopus, and James’s ingenious ‘Count Magnus’ solution would be hard to pull off now – but are the heart of the film (which otherwise pretends to be about vampire bats and ticks). They are the outstanding cultural example of the superposition of Weird and hauntological. We cannot sustain the skulltopus; as close as we can come is Painlevé’s skull-and-octopus-interaction quantum vampire.

5. Neoliberalism, the Skull and the Octopus

Hauntology and Weird are two iterations of the same problematic – that of crisis-blasted modernity showing its contradictory face, utterly new and traced with remnants, chaotic and nihilist and stained with human rebukes. We can see these tendencies of the fantastic pulling at each other in the years since James, who inaugurates their contrary twinned birth, in waves of varying speeds depending on the ideological moment. At times one or other iteration might be dominant, but neither can ever efface the other. Opposed but not separable, the traces of the Weird are inevitably sensible in a hauntological work, and vice versa.

The degree to which one or the other has been stronger has affected the tendency towards their separation as genres of thought and pulp. Since the 1970s their ‘separateness’ has become dominant, not because there is a ‘drive to separate’, but as a corollary of the oscillating efficacy of as-simon-pure-as-possible Weird and/or hauntology, for thinking our fraught and oppositional history since the end of Keynes­ianism, that great Cthulhu-swat and ghostbuster.

In quick and dirty caricature, with the advent of the neoliberal There Is No Alternative, the universe was an ineluctable, inhuman, implacable, Weird, place. More recently, however, as Eagleton haunto-illiterately points out, the ghosts have come back, in numbers, with the spectral rebuke that there was an alternative, once, so could be again.

We do not get to choose, however – and why would we want to? If we live in a haunted world – and we do – we live in a Weird one.

This essay is available in PDF form from Collapse.

* The original version of this essay erroneously conflated the fate of Helen Vaughan from Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’ with Carmilla’s. I am very grateful to Theodora Goss for pointing out this embarrassing geek fail.

END NOTES

(1) S.T. Joshi’s periodisation of the golden age of Weird as 1880 – 1940 is persuasive (S.T. Joshi, The Weird Tale, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

(2) I have argued this elsewhere: ‘Introduction’ to H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (NY: Random House, 2005); presentation at the ‘Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Theory’ event, London, Goldsmiths, 26 April 2007; ‘Weird Fiction’, in Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint (eds.), Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2008 [forthcoming]).

(3) In his contribution to the ‘Weird Realism’ event in 2007 (see previous note).

(4) William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland, and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002), 28 – 29.

(5) Named by Reza Negarestani for Pierre Dénys de Montfort (1766 – 1820), pioneering and dissident French malacologist, author of, among others, the multi-volume Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques (6 volumes [1 – 4 only by de Montfort]Paris: F. Dufart, 1801 – 5), which took seriously the existence of the ‘kraken octopus’ and ‘colossal octopus’, and included still-iconic illustrations.

(6) In fact the animal is, fittingly, slightly evasive of precise taxonomy: it is described as a ‘poulpe’, usually translated ‘octopus’, and as ‘calmar’, ‘squid’. Though it seems to resemble the latter more than the former, with eight limbs it is lacking the squid’s two longer hunting arms. It has also been translated into English as an ‘immense cuttlefish’, ‘devil-fish’, and indeed as a ‘poulp’.

(7) All quotations from Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, translated by William Butcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, revised 2001. Available at: & The Complete Works, translated by Alexis Lykiard (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1994), 101, 103.

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