The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 55
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'gestalts' rather than by patient accumulation of phenomenal details. We learn that we acquire
language in similar quantum jumps of grammatical competence. And we know that our acquired
languages in turn govern and shape our perceptions of this world."32 It is important to remember
that while the supernatural or weird often represents what we think of as non-physical or
impossible, nothing is non-physical or impossible: everything occurs in materialist space-in this
case, in the bio-chemical dialogues of mind. Selves are, as many have said, stories, and it is more
important to recognize that something strange might be informing this story in someone's
experiential mindspace (indeed, does inform when we consider the fragmentary, metaphoric,
revisionist nature of consciousness) than it is to decide that strange or supernatural things "do not
actually happen" and are therefore estranging features of a narrative.33 Darko Suvin, though he
regularly maneuvers his theories away from weird fiction in Metamorphoses ofScience Fiction,
realizes that "The aliens-utopians, monsters, or simply differing strangers-are a mirror to man
just as the differing country is a mirror for his world. But the mirror is not only a reflecting one, it
is also a transforming one, virgin womb and alchemical dynamo: the mirror is a crucible."34 The
problem of simply being (with all its concomitant anxieties, projections, threats, and concerns) is
what estranges characters, narrators, and selves. The strange or the bizarre is part of standard
consciousness-operation. The culturally agreed-upon mundane is what selves must successfully
incorporate into their senses of being.
Notes to Chapter 3
1 Sartre, qtd. in Todorov, The Fantastic A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,
Trans., Richard Howard (Ithaca, New York: Cornell Paperbacks, 1975), 173.
2 Ibid.55
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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/m1/59/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .