Article

Name: The Mythology of Creativity in the Metafictional Plots of Neo-Gothic and “Weird” Fiction

Authors: Natalia O. Laskina

Novosibirsk State Theatre Institute, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Plot, motif, genre in literature and folklore

Abstract:

The article examines the metapoetic play in contemporary hybrid genres that grew out of the tradition of horror literature. The Romantic myth of genius in Angela Carter’s postmodern Neo-Gothic fiction (“The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman”), the modernist canon in the works of the leaders of the contemporary “new weird fiction” Jeff VanderMeer (the “Ambergris” cycle) and China Miéville (“The Last Days of New Paris”) are subject to literalization and materialization. This strategy can be interpreted in the context of a comparison of the post- and metamodernist visions of creativity and authorship.

References to the Romantic canon in Carter can be interpreted in the context of the “anxiety of influence”. Creative freedom and the cult of fantasy generate a deformed reality, subordinated to the power of metanarratives. Although the plot of the novel is organized around attempts at resistance and liberation, it does not allow going beyond the intertextual field produced by the literary canon. At the new stage of the genre’s development, not only the stylistic nuances change, but also the relationship with the canon. Originality of the “new weird” authors is manifested, among other things, in the fact that the myth of the author as an all-powerful creator no longer needs to be exposed or ironically subverted, since it finally loses its meaning in a picture of the world devoid of permanent hierarchies. Characters in these narratives adapt, reconstruct the world and human life, explore new possibilities in situations where traditional forms of horror allowed only numbness and defeat as a result of an encounter with the uncanny. Therefore, the fictional acts of creativity in “weird” plots are as mobile and ambivalent as the world depicted. Unlike Hoffman as a sum of romantic geniuses and villains in Carter, Nabokov’s double in VanderMeer and the French surrealists in Miéville are not endowed with absolute power. Their creative force acts unpredictably and contradictorily and allows for alternative versions of the order of things. The article suggests that the strategies of new forms of speculative literature fit into a broader process of forming a narrative poetics of metamodernism, in which metafiction ceases to be a universal key to interpretation and turns out to be one of a number of heterogeneous and equally relevant ways of organizing a plot.

Keywords: metapoetics, metafiction, postmodernism, metamodernism, horror literature, Gothic novel, weird fiction

Bibliography:

Bloom H. Strakh vliyaniya. Karta perechityvaniya [The Anxiety of Influence. A map of misreading]. Ekaterinburg, Ural State Uni. Press, 1998, 352 p. (in Russ.)

Harman G. Weird-realizm: Lavkraft i filosofiya [Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy]. Perm, HylePress Publ., 2020, 258 p. (in Russ.)

Lyotard J.-F. Sostoyanie postmoderna [The Postmodern Condition]. Moscow, Institut eksperimental’noi sociologii Publ., St. Petersburg, Aleteiya Publ., 1998, 160 p. (in Russ.)

Zalomkina G. V. Goticheskii mif [The Gothic myth]. Samara, Samara State Uni. Press, 2010, 347 p. (in Russ.)