The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 5
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insofar as these stories are coherent within their own narrative frameworks, they exhibit no
concern for anchoring their models to a knowable world-that is to say, the "weird" elements in
stories do not have to "mean" anything. Frame stories can become main stories (as in Kelly
Link's "Lull" and Jeffrey Ford's "The Yellow Chamber").7 Landmasses and locomotion may re-
invent themselves as necessary for the story (as in Ed Park's "Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine,
the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts" and Christopher Rowe's "The
Force Acting on the Displaced Body").8 Dreams or alternate states of consciousness can make
the real world before they have even occurred (again "The Yellow Chamber," also Alex Irvine's
"Gus Dreams of Biting the Mailman" and Jonathan Lethem's "The Dystopianist, Thinking of His
Rival, Is Interrupted by a Knock on the Door").9 All of these instabilities and textual
experimentations point to a larger, overarching concern in the little weird: there are no worlds,
no realities; there are only people and their self-world metaphors. This, of course, can be clearer
in some works than in others, particularly in those that deal very directly with the anxiety of self
as far more destabilizing than invasions of the strange (as in Elizabeth Hand's "The Least
Trumps," Glen Hirshberg's "Shipwreck Beach," or Peter Straub's "Little Red's Tango").10 In
these last examples, there is certainly more of the "real world" than in, for example, "Lull" or
"The Yellow Chamber"; however, the first three demonstrate the same anxiety, for, as Mieke Bal
argues in Narratology:. Introduction to the Theory ofNarrative, events must be "motivated" for
inclusion in a narrative by who- or whatever is focalizing the elements of the story." These
focalizors are then "making" their worlds in accordance with what their personal anxieties
dictate warrants inclusion in the narration of their experiences.
It bears mentioning that my discussion and categorizing of the little weird is not a
manifesto. I am not proposing a call for literature that will voice the concerns of genre-blurring
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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/m1/9/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .