Pulp and other forms of genre fiction have become not just an accepted form of
entertainment, but an acknowledged outlet for meaningful artistic expression. But this is
a relatively recent phenomenon. For more than a century literary critics shunned pulp,
categorizing it as cheap entertainment for coarse consumers, junk food devoid of value.
Some actively discouraged its consumption.
Today literary elites no longer dictate broad cultural tastes—or if any do, they certainly
wield less power and influence than the likes of Harold Bloom, Edmund Wilson and
William Dean Howells once did. At least from my limited perspective.
But one result of this century of neglect is comparatively few literary studies. Only
recently have we seen a steady uptick with the likes of Jonas Prida’s Conan Meets the
Academy (2012), Justin Everett and Jeffrey Shanks’ The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales
(2015), Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie (2017), Bobby Derie’s Weird Talers:
Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others (2019), John Haefele’s Lovecraft: The Great
Tales (2021), and Stephen Jones’ The Weird Tales Boys (2023). We have plenty of
catching up to do, which makes Jason Ray Carney’s Weird Tales of Modernity
(McFarland, 2019) a welcome volume. It’s a work that certainly deserves more attention.
I recommend it strongly, with a few caveats.
The first caveat is price. McFarland describes itself as a leading independent publisher
of academic and general-interest nonfiction books, but academic publishers typically
charge more due to their small print runs, and McFarland, though cheaper than some
academic presses, is still pricey. This book runs nearly $40 new at just under 200
pages.
The second is accessibility. Weird Tales of Modernity is a challenging read. It took me a
while to get into the flow due to the denseness of Carney’s language and use of
academic jargon. I have a degree in English and have read (and even appreciate)
academic writing, but it’s been a while since I tackled such material and needed to
shake off a little rust to get back into that headspace. It probably also assumes a little
too much familiarity with literary modernism.
But once I acclimated to the language I both enjoyed Weird Tales of Modernity as an
entertaining read, and for the compelling case it makes for the literary merits of H.P.
Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard. Carney’s central thesis is that the
“Weird Tales Three” were not just producing entertainment, but contributing
meaningfully as original artists writing in reaction to literary modernism.
This would be a good time to explain that particular term.
Literary modernism was an experimental mode of fiction in vogue from roughly the late
1800s to the early 1940s, peaking in the interwar period (1920-39)—roughly concurrent
to the literary output of Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith. It was a time marked by profound
disillusionment in institutions and doubt that universal truth and human progress were
possible. Rapid changes in technology and industrialization coupled with the carnage of
World War I made old certainties a shifting sand.
Amid these rapid changes artists such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, William Faulker, and
Virginia Wolfe adapted modes of literary expression to match, abandoning old traditions
and pioneering new prose and poetry techniques--slice of life, introspection, emphasis
on realism, abandonment of meter and rhyme in poetry. As the old sureties in life were
slipping away, they sought to achieve immortality through “art in amber,” even if just in
limited, fragmentary glimpses. A chief example is Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a dense and
sprawling work which depicted the events of 24 hours in the life of Leopold Bloom.
Carney argues that Smith, Lovecraft, and Howard were aware of this movement, but
instead of engaging in it produced stories of shadow modernism, “strange art, artists,
and experience of art created in reaction to modernity.” Howard’s decaying cities and
corrupt civilizations and Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones and uncaring, indifferent cosmicism
were symbolic representations of the terrible ephemerality that lurked behind the
seeming consistency of our day-to-day lives—the inevitable march of time and the
subsequent corruption and decay of all human endeavor. The Weird Tales Three saw
through this veil and understood the ephemerality of life—the “ephemerality of the
ordinary” as Carney repeats in an oft-used phrase. “Irrespective of tribe, race, clique, or
coterie, we are all ephemeral forms trembling in strange stasis destined for
formlessness.”
Capturing the ephemerality of human endeavor required more than the language of literary modernism could provide. It required fantastic and extraordinary literary
techniques married to the techniques of the Gothic novel—hallmarks of the Weird Tales Three. Writes Carney, “After many creative iterations honed over several stories—e.g.,
Pickman’s demented art, Malygris’s sorcery, the fell mirrors of Tuzun Thune—this shadow modernism becomes an inhuman form of technology that, functioning like a cognitive prosthesis in the virtual world of fiction, thereby reveals the secret truth of history: history is a cruelly accelerating process of deformation. The ordinary is
ephemeral. History is the interplay of form and formlessness with formlessness
terminally ascendant.”
Carney does an impressive job supporting his thesis with multiple references from the
literature, both from mainstream modernist writers and from Howard, Lovecraft, and
Smith. I found his arguments original and convincing, offering new insights and
perspectives I hadn’t previously considered. If you take these writers seriously it’s a
book you ought to seek out.
In addition to his scholarship Carney has done much of note for sword-and-sorcery and
the broader field of pulp fiction. His efforts building the online Whetstone discord community (which recently shut down after a notable run of some five years), initiating
the Trigon awards and associated conference, organizing academic panels at Howard
Days, and of course establishing the Whetstone Amateur Magazine of Pulp Sword-and-
Sorcery, served an important function for many. We’re all on the same path of
dissolution and formlessness, which makes any efforts to make sense of the art we
enjoy while offering warmth and community for other like-minded souls deeply
appreciated and sorely needed. Weird Tales of Modernity and Carney’s broader oeuvre
serve as a bulwark against the ephemerality of the ordinary.
Purchase "Weird Tales of Modernity here: https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Tales-Modernity-Ephemerality-Lovecraft/dp/1476668035
Visit Brian Murphy's Blog "The Silver Key" here: https://thesilverkey.blogspot.com/