The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 72
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Starlight, the matter of the strange orchard house appears in the narrative. This house will later
play a significant, self-world role in the story of "Ed," but at first, it appears simply as an
inexplicable anomaly, a metaphor, perhaps, of the irreconcilable nature of normal that each of
the friends struggles with. Ed tells us in the first story that "'Off the highway, down by that
Texaco, in the orchards. This guy built a road and built a house right on top of the road. Just,
plop, right in the middle of the road. Kind of like he came walking up the road with the house on
his back, got tired, and just dropped it'" (55). No one involved in the story-locale's cultural
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discourse knows the explanation behind the strange house.22 Even if "Lull" did point to a fabula,
any person who could explain the mystery of the orchard house would be beyond it, for he or she
is not included in the "story": "Ed says, "Where the house is, is the first weird thing. The second
thing is the house. It's like this team of architects went crazy and sawed two different houses in
half and then stitched them back together. Casa Del Guggenstein. The front half is really old-a
hundred years old-the other half is aluminum siding'" (55, italics mine). As such, the
characters are left only with constantly anchorless theories perpetuated by their own and by the
locale's cultural discourse to explain the anomaly-the house becomes a meaning vacuum, for it
will always be, as the story explains, beyond understanding: "Which was the plan because this
guy who built it was a real hermit, a recluse. People in town said all kinds of stuff about him.
Nobody knew. He didn't want anybody to know" (57). The house undergoes the same extended-
self revision that generates "real" selves, which, of course, inform how we negotiate meaning
from Link's characters. The house's unstable nature invites any number of constant and variable
projections of self-anxiety onto the house-it can become one of Neisser's extended selves, an
acting place powered by what the characters put upon it. Without a fabula, with only realities of
nullity to point to, semiotic sinkholes like the house metaphorize the real-world disconnect72
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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/m1/76/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .