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Apollonian Weird: Susanna Clark’s Piranesi Clarke’s dream world mines Apollonian aesthetics for what weirdness can be found in such a “measured limitation.” And Cisco’s genre-mixing jumble attempts a Dionysian illegibility: a dismembered nonnarrative in the “unlanguage of unknowning,” also referred to as “lingua obscura, enigmatica, oraculo, youming yuyan (language of the quiet depths), lugha al lughz (language of riddles), bhasa sammudha (bewildering language), confusion, phantasmagoria, parabolica, eavesdropia” (p. Each develops weirdness according to its particular modality with real virtuosity. The novels under review fail to synthesize these tendencies in interesting ways. Apollonian and Dionysian forms of weirdness are equally attainable, and the best works in this genre-like the tragedies Nietzsche analyzes-reconcile these tendencies, fusing subjectively rich pictorial fantasies with the “thrilling,” subject-destroying power of “rhythmics, dynamics, and harmony.” Unfortunately much contemporary scholarship of the weird tends to normalize the Apollonian and therefore seek weirdness only in the grotesque, abject, and dreadful, forgetting the eeriness of the ‘good’ life. the genuine ‘witches’ draught,’” it would be a mistake to assign weirdness to this modality alone (30). Joy and horror mingle in an ego-destroying voice that gives expression to the singularity of “nature,” which “must sigh over her dismemberment into individuals” (31).Īlthough the Dionysian partakes of “that detestable mixture of lust and cruelty which has always seemed. The dream of an objectified and idealized self is torn to pieces by the ecstasy and horror of ritualized carnality. Nobility and idealism give way to Delphic “ecstasies” that celebrate those moments when “pain beget joy” and joy “sounds the cry of horror over an irretrievable loss” (31). Subjective ideals are sacrificed on the altar of the more primal intersubjectivity they annul.
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The music of Dionysus counters Apollo’s “pictorial world of dreams” with “drunken reality, which likewise does not heed the unit man, but even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness” (28). 24-5).Īgainst the singular perfection of sculpted Apollo, Nietzsche describes a Dionysian aesthetics of “drunkenness” and “the narcotic draught”-the “emotions awake” and “the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness” (26). Thus, we are left with “a measured limitation,” “freedom from the wilder emotions,” and “that philosophical calmness of the sculptor-god” (p. A superficiality haunts the perfection, a phantasmal supplement that maintains the totality by assigning each part its place. The Apollonian style emphasizes “the beauteous appearance of dream-worlds,” in which “all forms speak to us there is nothing indifferent, nothing superfluous”-save the whole edifice, which has, “glimmering though it, the sensation of its appearance” (21). In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues, with “the immediate certainty of intuition,” that Attic tragedy reconciles these aesthetic modalities, which are otherwise involved in “perpetual conflicts” throughout “the continuous develop of art” (21). The difference between the approaches to weirdness presented in these novels suggests Nietzsche’s distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian styles. I resolved to swallow the one with the other and indeed, they present such an interesting contrast that the differences between them prove more fruitful than either would be on its own. This oddly shaped (9 x 9”), self-described “workbook” in the arts of “unlanguage” promised to be, as I mentioned at the end of my previous post, “the weirdest novel of 2018.” Then two things happened: I found Unlangauge, true to its name, nearly impossible to read, and I heard a Weird Studies podcast extolling the strangeness of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, published in 2020. My original intention for this post was to close a series of contemporary weird novel reviews with an analysis of Michael Cisco’s Unlanguage, published in 2018 by Eraserhead books. James S Arroyo on Weird Fiction Review #9: The C… Matthiasregan on Weird Fiction Review #9: The C…Īlia storino on Weird Fiction Review #9: The C… Weird fiction… on Weird Fiction Review #9: The C…
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Weird Fiction Review #9: The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay.Weird Fiction Review #10: On the Apollonian and Dionysian in Weird Fiction Today–Piranesi and Unlanguage.