It’s been a while since I wrote about my online reading. In part, that’s because I’ve had less time to keep up with the magazines I like, in part because I’ve been unusually hard to entertain—
in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent.
I hesitate to borrow this description, from the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, since it immediately precedes his nervous breakdown, risking hyperbole—or manifestation.
The idea of “manifesting” is like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit: you can see it two ways, as practical self-assertion or as magic. It invokes the perforation of life’s fabric by mysterious powers whose operation is always ambiguous—open to interpretation through natural causes. In that way, it has an affinity with what Clayton Purdom, in the LARB, calls “weird nonfiction”:
creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements with the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience. Works that are about the real world or some subject within it but also question their container or their ability to be about that thing—or which veer from the thing at hand toward the cosmic, horrifying, or absurd.
Many of Purdom’s examples are films, like Sans Soleil and F is for Fake. But he also cites the prose of Lydia Davis and W. G. Sebald. To which I would add Stewart Lee’s disorienting audio documentary about the unreliable narrator. “More often than not,” Purdom writes, “weird nonfiction is intended as either comedy or horror—sometimes both.”
He relates the genre, appropriately, to H. P. Lovecraft:
Like weird fiction, weird nonfiction is built around some unknowable terror, replacing the tentacled horrors of H. P. Lovecraft with the many-tentacled horrors of being online and alive in the 21st century. It also suggests, in the process, that there is something unfathomable at the heart of reality itself, and that it is the duty of journalism to circumnavigate this terror if never speak it aloud.
Where Lovecraft’s fiction often flirts with the texture of the documentary—investigative journalism, the scientific report—weird nonfiction flirts with the uncanny or absurd.
Purdom is right that the form is "well suited to reporting on climate change”—though, like him, I haven’t seen it done. For years, I’ve thought of traveling to the Antarctic with Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness, as my guide, confronting the precarity of our existence—and survival—on a geological scale, the scale of Lovecraft’s Old Ones and Rachel Sussman’s photographs of the oldest living things on Earth, catalogued by Marcia Bjornerud in Timefulness:
a brain coral that has been alive since the time of Plato; baobabs and bristlecone pines that were seedlings when Stonehenge was built; Australian stromatolites doing what they have done since the Proterozoic; Siberian soil bacteria that slumbered for 700,000 years, through six ice advances, now reawakened by Anthropocene warming. These Old Ones open our eyes to alternative relationships with time. They help us, vicariously, to see beyond the horizon of our own mortal limits.
If I could write the travelogue of my journey, it would be weird nonfiction, a tale of forces that threaten the human world, indifferent to us, on scales of time and terror that defy the imagination.
Purdom looks the other way, not to geology but technology, our own uncanny creations and what they create:
I need to tell you how terrified I was to realize that, by the definition I outlined in the opening section of this essay, all generative AI is weird nonfiction.
It is “creative work that presents itself as journalism or nonfiction but introduces fictional elements”—and while it may not have “the intention of upsetting, disturbing, or confusing the audience”—it should.
Nicely done, as usual. Yeah, Seebald. More on that front in due course.