The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 48
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Regress" or of "Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine" when we try to reconcile the real thing with
our own narratives of self. There are no landscapes; there are only selves expressing experiential
spaces, and the weird, not the normal, constitutes their true vocabulary.
Further Analysis
There are many consequences of the realization that a self is weird-one of the most
disturbing is how it makes room for the fallacy that "association means causation" or how it
allows what Todorov calls "pan-determinism,"20 In short, the weirding of self and space can
make gods and monsters responsible for the events that inform our anxieties of being. As Mieke
Bal points out in Narratology:. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, the world becomes
agentive:
Spaces function in a story in two ways. On the one hand, they are only a frame, a place of
action. In this capacity a more or less detailed presentation will lead to a more or less
concrete picture of that space. The space can also remain entirely in the background. In
many cases, however, space is "thematized": it becomes an object of presentation itself,
for its own sake. Space thus becomes an "acting place" rather than the place of action.21
So, if as Bal observes, places in literary narratives can be imbued with force, agency, or theme, so
can they be similarly imbued in the narratives of self and world. A place, or many places, can
either calm or exacerbate a character's (or self' s) anxieties-his or her concerns about sustaining
self, these concerns being some of the primary factors determining what one perceives, what
world one makes. And as Bohm points out, thought is experience-under these circumstances,
either actual world-building or that which appears in a textual narrative. The often-strangeness of
world building in the little weird only aligns it even more closely to a human consciousness than
"realistic" literature in that it both invokes the idea with its characters and activates the process in
its readers.48
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Bradley, Darin Colbert. The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction, dissertation, May 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3703/m1/52/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .