Shoes s Wholesale a Shoes c Voyaient For what it’s worth, the last place I saw the Skulltopus was as the Hydra insignia in Captain America. Come to think of it, that might have been the first place I saw it, and yet, appropriately enough, it had a resonance even then of a thing witnessed and not quite fully remembered. Or perhaps I’d never witnessed it, but the synchresis seemed so inevitable that I felt I had.
Either way, fun.
Hauntology haunts the world. Words that change, words that disappear, reappear, or appear from nothing. There’s a whole realm of the supernatural we do not acknowledge because to do so would be to understand that we live in a nightmare.
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I am curious if this is a coincidental usage of the word “hauntology”, bred by necessity, or if it has some relation to the musical “hauntology” of Burial, The Advisory Circle, and Coeur Machant, which was supposedly dismissed as a hoax, or the philosophical “hauntology” which is the current tenant of the pedia article. While the above explanation may be most likely, it appeals to my poetic side that perhaps there is a critical conspiracy to use the word like a clothes-horse for ever more intriguing and modish outfits. Or perhaps, if that is placing too much weight on the concept, then it may be that “hauntology” is a persistent rolling donut at which scholars may send an aerial fornication. For what it’s worth, this literary definition of the word seems the most well-developed. Bravo, again, Mr. Mieville.
Excellent essay. One quibble: James was indeed an antiquary in the sense that the term was used at the time. Although we remember him most notoriously for his supernatural tales, he was also the translator of numerous ancient and medieval manuscripts; he produced the de facto translation of the Apocryphal New Testament, still widely in use to this day:
“The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in ‘Western’ aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture.” What about the kraken in Greco-Roman mythology? Viking legends about squid-like monsters? The appearance of tentacled beasties in Renaissance woodcuts of sea-monsters? I would agree that tentacled monsters were disproportionately rare in European myth to other monster-legends, but to claim Lovecraft created a radical shift in popularizing it is really only a change in relative degree rather than necessarily a change in kind. Pingback: Leave a Reply